Meaning of “Self-respect, originating in self-love, instigates the first step…”

The Woman’s Bible, Stanton commentary; the line appears in her critique of idealizing women’s self-sacrifice and is preserved in the Project Gutenberg text.

Walt Whitman, 'Song of the Open Road,' section 5 in the represented 1882 Leaves of Grass text. 'I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness' follows the speaker's declaration of being loosed from imagined limits. It remains poetic first-person self-discovery rather than empirical psychology.

Self-Control, Its Kingship and Majesty, later discussion of individual possibility. The sentence is motivational rhetoric about human potential rather than a measurable universal prediction.

The Woman's Bible, The Book of Judges, Chapter II, Judges xi, Project Gutenberg #9880. Stanton imagines Jephthah's unnamed daughter rejecting sacrifice: ‘My first duty is to develop all the powers given to me and to make the most of myself and my own life.’ This is Stanton's invented protest voice within her commentary, not a biblical quotation or speech preserved in Judges.

How to Succeed, chapter “Hold Up Your Head,” in the Project Gutenberg text; the book’s period language and success philosophy are preserved as historical self-development writing.

Sartor Resartus, Book II, Chapter IX, “The Everlasting Yea,” printed page 156 / Wikisource scan leaf 188 in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896). “The Ideal is in thyself” occurs in the same spiritual-enfranchisement passage, where Teufelsdröckh argues that the present “Actual” supplies the material to shape an inward Ideal. This collection retains that fictional, metaphysical and explicitly religious frame rather than converting it into modern clinical or self-esteem doctrine.