Quotes About Self

The human body essentially recreates iteself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were in February.

I didn't want to need his affirmation. But part of our selves is spirit, and our spirits are thirsty, and my father's words went into my spirit like water.

I LIKE WHAT THE DANCER MARTHA GRAHAM ONCE said, that each of us is unique and if we didn't exist something in the world would have been lost. I wonder, then, why we are so quick to conform—and what the world has lost because we have.

The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest.

Every human being wakes up each morning and sees the world through the lens of a protagonist. The world revolves around us, regardless of how altruistic, generous, and selfless a person we may be.

I don't believe we are accidents in the world, and I don't believe we were supposed to be actors either. I think we were supposed to be ourselves and we were meant as a miracle.

Six billion people live in this world, and I can only muster thoughts for one. Me.

I began to wonder if what we were doing it evangelical circles had more to do with redeeming ourselves to culture than it did with showing Jesus to a hurting world, a world literally filled with outcasts.

The stories we tell ourselves are very different from the stories we tell the world.

Every human being wakes up each morning and sees the world through the lens of a protagonist. The world revolves around us, regardless of how altruistic, generous, and selfless a person we may be. Each day is, quite literally, about how we encounter our world. Potential customers feel the same way about themselves. They are the center of their world.

Every human being wakes up each morning and sees the world through the lens of a protagonist.

What if part of God's message to the world was you? The true and real you?

We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.

Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.

It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out. A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

We don't like to admit it, said Julian, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks and the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can never truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?

And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of 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.

It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out. A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.

And if what they say is true--if every great painting is really a self-portrait--what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?

the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth