Quotes About Self-transcendence

Mother Teresa was once asked by a journalist why she does what she does, that is, how she is able to take the dying poor from the streets of Calcutta, nurse and love them. Her response reflected her deep self-knowledge: "I realized a long time ago that I had a Hitler within me."2 This realization became the basis of her self-transcendence and of her unique holiness.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident to one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.

To her it seemed an inevitable thing as much a part of herself as her breathing; and yet it appeared transcendent of self, and she looked up and onwards towards her love--for the eyes of the young are drawn to the stars and the spirit of youth is seldom earth-bound." p146

How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

For the uniqueness of man lies in his capacity for self-transcendence.

Arise, transcend Thyself, Thou art man and the whole nature of man Is to become more than himself.

We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves.

At present I am light, now I fly, now I see myself below me, now a god dances through me.

When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about.

You must climb above yourself-up and beyond, until you have even your stars under you.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.

As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves.

When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself. Once you have given that up, all your other relationships will be love relationships.

There is a good and needed "narcissism," if you want to call it that. You have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it.

One has to die to the separate self in oder to find the universal Self or God […] as the mystics everywhere have repeatedly told us, it is only in accepting death that real life is found. (A Universe within, p. 79)

Life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves.

All fear is ultimately fear of no-self. "And what is enlightenment," I ask Sarah, "but a swan dive into the abyss of no-self?

Human evolution has two steps - from being somebody to being nobody; and from being nobody to being everybody. This knowledge can bring sharing and caring throughout the world.

Learning always involves self-transcendence. Learning calls forth what is in us, helping us to move toward authenticity and wholeness.

He liked the thought that his own power would one day be refined into translucence, with no memory of the blood and earth that had generated it.

The freedom we must defend is freedom for the practice of these virtues. It is freedom for excellence, the freedom that enables us to master ourselves. It is a freedom that, far from being negated by rigorous standards of scholarship, demands them. It is not the freedom of "if it feels good, do it"; it is, rather, the freedom of self-transcendence, the freedom from slavery to self.

the longest way round is the shortest way home." Our truest fulfillment does not lie in the direction of a jealously guarded self but in the direction of self-transcendence as we learn to open to others and to reality.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it.