Quotes About Self

Your body expresses yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I shall be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle. Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it.

If someone gives you permission, they can take it away. I give myself permission.

When you're too mad and too rattled to see straight, you're bound to make mistakes. You can't go on and on for years being miserable about a situation and not have it change you. You get so you can't stand yourself.

E quale è di pazzia segno più espresso che, per altri voler, perder se stesso?

M]an [has] the power of abstraction from himself[.]

Whatever kind of object … we are at any time conscious of, we are always at the same time conscious of our own nature[.]

A] being to whom his own species … is an object of thought can [also] make the essential nature of other things or beings an object of thought. Hence … man [has] a twofold life: … an inner and outer life. … Man thinks – that is, he converses with himself. Man is himself at once I and thou; he can put himself in place of another, for this reason, that to him his species, his essential nature, and not merely his individuality is an object of thought.

In the perception of the senses consciousness of the object is distinguishable from consciousness of self; … in religion, consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide. … The object of the sense is … indifferent … ; … the object of religion is a selected object; … it essentially presupposes a critical judgement, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy.

M]an in religion – in his relation to God – is in relation to his own nature[.]

O]mnipotence is nothing else than subjectivity exempting itself from all objective conditions and limitations[.]

The course of religious development … consists … in … that man abstracts more and more from God, and attributes more and more to himself. … That which to a later age or a cultured people is given by nature or reason, is to an earlier age, or to a yet uncultured people, given by God.

T]he object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject's own … objective nature.

Only that which is apart from my own being is capable of being doubted by me. How then can I doubt of God, who is my being? To doubt of God is to doubt of myself.

W]hile you believe in and construct your supra- and extra-natural God, you believe in and construct nothing else than the supra- and extra-naturalism of your own self.

T]he Christians abolished the distinction between soul and person, species and individual, and therefore placed immediately in self what belongs only to the totality of the species.

M]an places the aim of his action in God, but God has no other aim of action than the moral and eternal salvation of man: thus man has in fact no other aim than himself.

Man … projects his being into objectivity. … [T]hen … makes himself an object to this projected image of himself[.]

Religion, at least the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, … The divine being is … human nature purified, freed from the limits of individual man, made objective … All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.

In Christianity, man was concentrated only on himself, he unlinked himself from the chain of sequences in the system of the universe, he made himself a self-sufficing whole, … [H]e no longer regarded himself as being immanent in the world, because he severed himself from connection with it[.]

In breathing I am an object of the air, the air the subject; but when I make the air an object of thought, of investigation, when I analyse it, I reverse the relation - I make myself the subject, the air an object.

God is the mirror of man.

That which I think only according to the standard of my individuality is not binding on another; it can be conceived otherwise; it is an accidental, merely subjective view.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

We are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts we can't become.