What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.
Alain de Botton
A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.
Alice McDermott
While I ridicule books of self-help, I'm also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things.
Amitava Kumar
Like every other self-respecting academic, I'm distrustful of self-help books.
In academe, we ought to temper our criticism of the idea of self-help because, in a more complex way, it is precisely what we offer our students through our teaching.
I go to a lot of self-help groups in the day, and then I can sleep pretty well at night.
Andy Biersack
I don't think of literary novels as self-help documents, although literature undoubtedly saved my life when I was young, enabling me to disappear into all manner of stories, to recognise feelings that I felt alone in.
Bill Clegg
Even though it doesn't look like it, I run. On a treadmill. And I bounce around to all the songs on my iPod - the Pixies, Wagner, Richard and Linda Thompson, even books on tape. Just not self-help ones.
Bill Hader
I worked at a nursing home though high school... There's a lost appreciation for a generation that has so much to tell us when we're so full of self-help books and doctors on TV.
Bonnie Hunt
Business coaching and the personal development and self-help industry is considered to be one of the booming industries today.
Brendon Burchard
I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it. It's a form of self-help.
Brian K. Vaughan
I can't get enough of self-help books of all kinds.
Bruce Eric Kaplan
What I like about graduation speeches is that they're an opportunity for someone to make sense of their life and to impart that wisdom to someone else. It's like a sanctioned self-help moment.
Self-help is something that I've always been into. I thought I was going to be a psychiatrist.
Charlamagne tha God
I don't usually read self-help books, but I read a great book by a guy called Wayne Dyer: 'The Power of Intention,' which I loved.
Chris Pine
I'd been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings.
Clarence Thomas
As a business consultant, I am a voracious reader of self-help books, case studies of thriving companies, and the biographies and autobiographies of the world's most successful people. I relentlessly implement the best ideas into my businesses.
Clay Clark
I do believe in self-help.
Clint Eastwood
I'm not a great believer in self-help.
Daniel Kahneman
How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I'm wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are certain rules. I'm very happy for people to look at my story and say it's possible to achieve many things.
Daniel Tammet
I'm really wary of self-help books.
Memory enhancement self-help programs abound and promise improved memory performance by the utilization of any number of seemingly unique techniques focused on the context of how information is encoded.
So many self-help ideas are like meringue - you take a big bite, and there's nothing there.
I dislike the word 'self-help.' Self-awareness, yes, but not self-help.
I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.
I didn't intend 'Hector' to be a self-help book when I first started writing. I wrote it as a little tale about a psychiatrist, like me, who sets off around the world in order to discover the vital ingredients for happiness.
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
The thing I love most about going to a book store is the self-help section is the biggest section because Americans know we're screwed up. We know it. But we want to get better.
I'm not a fan of self-help books - how can something be 'self-help' if the book itself is purportedly helping you?
Cooking, decorating, diet/self-help and gardening books are guilty pleasures and useful time fillers.
The self-help section of national bookstore chains in America is one of the largest sections. In a way, it's nothing new, and in another way, very new. People have always searched for answers; that's why we have religion. People have always been seeking some relief from their own mortality.
All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.
I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.
I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable... self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life.
Music is gathering. Taking our scattered thoughts and senses and coalescing us back into our core. Music is powerful. The first few chords can change us where no self-help books can.
Self-help books are for the birds. Self-help groups are where it's at.
I'm totally into new age and self-help books. I used to work in a bookstore and that's the section they gave me, and I got way into it. I just loved the power of positive thinking, letting yourself go.
I've read, like, 10,000 self-help books.
I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I've just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I've read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that.
I am the first person to go to Barnes & Noble and buy the new self-help book. I like to fill out the surveys, then I get my friends' opinions on how I answered to see if I was being honest with myself or not.
Many self-help books give you these neat, tidy formulas that are really illusions. They dupe people into thinking, 'Well if I can just do that, then everything's going to be okay.' My work differs in that I don't offer quick solutions and simple explanations.
I'm not that into reading. If I'm gonna read, I'm gonna read some cool sci-fi book or something, not some stupid self-help book.
I never read a self-help book except for the Bible.
One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.
Any book is a self-help guide if you can take something from it.
My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I'm fascinated by Jung, by dream work.
Go to any bookstore, and you'll see thousands of books on etiquette, which suggests there's a lot of self-help going on. There is hope.
I've experienced several different healing methodologies over the years - counseling, self-help seminars, and I've read a lot - but none of them will work unless you really want to heal.
'Focusing' is no conventional repackaging of self-help wisdom. It is at once a manual and a philosophy. It talks about the body's wisdom, the steps of the focusing technique, how to discover the richness in others by learning to listen.
Many people come to self-help material because they feel like something is wrong with them or the way they are. The problem is that anything that tells you how to improve your life is also implying that there is something inherently wrong with you the way you are.
