self Quotes

“Dysfunctional families are frozen in a trancelike state. The shame-core keeps the system frozen. Everyone is in hiding. The roles cover up each person’s true and authentic self. ”

“We sat still and we held our breath. For our face and our body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt no pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straight and thin and hard and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.”

“the universe took its time on you crafted you precisely so you could offer the world something distinct from everyone else so when you doubt how you were created you doubt an energy greater than us both”

“Don’t you study about other folks’s business till you take care of your own.”

“Self knowledge is the basis of true knowledge.”

“The problem of human existence is the forgetfulness of the Divine essence of the Self and the identification with the body as the Self.”

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was- I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.”

“I want to sue (my parents) for the rights to my own body.”

“I have a feeling that if I really try to figure out who I am without Kate in the equation, I’m not going to like who I see.”

“Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”

“It’s a time when men and women come to know what they truly are. A time of purging.” I’d been looking at the ceiling as he spoke. At his final words, I turned to face him in surprise. “Is that what the Catholics mean by purgatory?” “In essence.” He nodded. “A period during which each soul is cleansed by a self-imposed recognition of past deeds—and misdeeds.”

“What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one’s own, when self-pretense is no longer possible?”

“He was traveling (on the train that never stopped). His self, his mind, raced on and he felt he hadn’t stopped going wherever he was going because he hadn’t yet arrived.”

“I is the hardest word to define.”

“Ask yourself: What is the best I can do? And then do that.”

“There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, an exquisite mystical experience.”

“Have no friends not equal to yourself.”

″‘I don’t see what’s so triflic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ‘cos they act like people,’ said Adam severely. ‘Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.‘”

“When you’re rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even those you love.”

“I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back.”

“After leaving their bodies, they who have killed the Self go to the worlds of the Asuras, covered with blinding ignorance.”

“He who sees all beings in the Self and the Self in all beings, he never turns away from It (the Self).”

“He who perceives all beings as the Self for him how can there be delusion or grief, when he sees this oneness (everywhere)?”

“Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time… if you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated.”

“The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing.”

“My book was nowhere to be found. Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.”

“This book probably makes it seem like I hate myself and everything I do. But that’s not totally true. I mostly just hate every person I’ve ever been. I’m actually fine with myself right now.”

“The boundaries of your life are merely a creation of the self.”

“You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.”

“Junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.”

“I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— I too awaited the expected guest.”

“We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.”

“I remember saying in a voice that was not like my own that it was too light.”

“There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now... The girl I saw was myself not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us – hard, cold, and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?”

“I scarcely recognized her voice. No warmth, no sweetness. The doll had a doll’s voice, a breathless but curiously indifferent voice.”

“I want to learn everything about everything. I want to eat it all up. I want to discover myself.”

“Good. Tonight, after you were gone, I thought a lot. About you and how you’ve been treating me and I thought, “Why do I love you?” And then, I felt everything in me just let go of everything I was holding onto so tightly. And it hit me that I don’t have an intellectual reason. I don’t need one. I trust myself, I trust my feelings. I’m not gonna try to be anything other than who I am anymore and I hope you can accept that.”

“I didn’t know how close she was to the person who had gone completely fugue at the party.”

“It’s times like this that I’m real glad I have friends. They say friends are worth your weight in gold.”

“Medea: we (women) bid the highest price in dowries just to buy some man to be dictator of our bodies… How that compounds the wrong!”

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

“That which is within you and directs your life knows already. It’s good to realize that within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.”

“Meanwhile Bartleby sat in his hermitage, oblivious to everything but his own particular business there.”

“Connor is a celebrity in his dormitory. He finds it absurd and surreal that the kids here see him as some sort of symbol, when all he did was survive.”

“A person whose desires and impulses are his own- are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture- is said to have character.”

“Each man’s life represents a road toward himself, and attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself.”

“I wanted only to try to live in accord with the prompting which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”

“Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary… if I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby, to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience.”

“Images, pictures, desires arose freely within me, drew me away from the outside world so that I had more substantial and livelier relationship with the world of my own creation, with these images and dreams and shadows, than with the actual world around me.”

″‘Ain’t no one gonna tell you what’s in your heart,’ he tells Lev. ‘You gotta find that out for yourself.‘”

″‘So… everything that happened back there was all a show?’ Now it’s Connor’s turn to be unsure. ‘I guess. Sort of. Wasn’t it?‘”

″‘Don’t you see, Lev? You can save yourself. You can be anyone you want to be now.‘”

“I disliked weekends. Everybody was out on the streets. Everybody was playing Ping-Pong or mowing their lawn or polishing their car or going to the supermarket or the beach or to the park. Crowds everywhere. Monday was my favorite day. Everybody was back on the job and out of sight.”

“Donny brought the drink and he and Dee Dee talked. They seemed to know the same people. I didn’t know any of them. It took a lot to excite me. I didn’t care. I didn’t like New York. I didn’t like Hollywood. I didn’t like rock music. I didn’t like anything. Maybe I was afraid. That was it – I was afraid. I wanted to sit alone in a room with the shades down. I feasted upon that. I was a crank. I was a lunatic. And Lydia was gone.”

“The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.”

“We can’t hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go.”

“Consciousness creates form. It is not the other way around. All personalities are not physical. It is only because you are so busily concerned with daily matters that you do not realize that there is a portion of you who knows that its own powers are far superior to those shown by the ordinary self.”

“You may grow frustrated and depressed, never realizing that the source of it is your alienation from your own creative potential.”

“You are not tied to a particular position; your loyalty is not to a career or a company. You are committed to your Life’s Task, to giving it full expression. It is up to you to find it and guide it correctly. It is not up to others to protect or help you. You are on your own.”

“It’s so much easier to point a finger than to take responsibility yourself, isn’t it? Maybe it isn’t so simple as this person’s fault or that one. Maybe we make up the dance together, as we go along, and no one knows what the result will be.”

“…the best actors are the most boring people. A strong sense of self was detrimental, because an actor had to let the self disappear; he had to let himself be subsumed by a character. ‘If you want to be a personality, be a pop star.‘”

″(His) vision, his version of himself was singular to the point of being delusional.”

“Stuff comes and stuff goes and the only thing that matters in the end is who you are inside, what you do and what make it leaves in the world.”

″(Their relationship) existed to no one but themselves: it seemed something sacred, and fought-for, and unique to them…in it, he played a role for one other person, and that person was his only audience, and no one else ever saw it, no matter how much they thought they might.”

″(His) vision, his version of himself was singular to the point of being delusional.”

“The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you’ve never even thought of. And you’re stuck with you’re past when you’re stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.”

“This is your worth, who you really are, you degree that can go with you wherever you go, that you bring with you the moment you come into a room, that can’t be manipulated or shaken. Without that sense of self, no amount of paper, no pedigree, and no credentials can make you legit. No matter what, you have to feel legit inside first.”

“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose.”

“I am Inigo Montoya and I do not accept defeat.”

Oh, how happy he would have been if he could have blamed himself!