Quotes About Self

In the book, he said, the self is fixed, made concrete; the book is the intersection of the soul and time.

We don't have a good vocabulary for these experiences. They come in variations and degrees, from a slight apprehension of the strangeness of being to the ravishing dissolution of boundaries called enlightenment. A mystical experience, a peak experience, a blurring or merge between self and other, a liberation from the limits of space and time.

When you operate from the assumption that more or better analysis will create consistency, you will be driven to gather as many market variables as possible into your arsenal of trading tools. But what happens then? You are still disappointed and betrayed by the markets, time and again, because of something you didn't see or give enough consideration to. It will feel like you can't trust the markets; but the reality is, you can't trust yourself.

It helps us to create and re-create ourselves, often against harsh odds. So I will be talking here about the crafting of souls.

Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.

We are what we think, having become what we thought.

The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one.

In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves.

Something worth loving. But she could not love him as long as she hated herself. Her past wouldn't allow it.

The first step in finding the sane inside the crazy is to believe it's there.

Realizing that it isn't personal doesn't mean you shouldn't take it personally. If you don't, in fact, it may mean that you haven't put enough of yourself into the effort.

I want my name to mean me.

To show them who you are.

There is something unspeakably consoling in one's own smile. In that reflection, you can discern the face of yourself as a child and the face of yourself as a corpse. And in this moment, all the fundamental antinomies are reconciled--the sacred and the profane, the analyst and the analysand, the celebrated success and the abject failure. The pilot and the passenger. Writer and reader. Fiction and nonfiction. Past and present. And the mind that abides and the mind that is gone.

This method is a bit trickier to use, though, because assigning to any self attributes within __setattr__ calls __setattr__ again, potentially causing an infinite recursion loop (and a fairly quick stack overflow exception!).

If you wish to use this method, you can avoid loops by coding instance attribute assignments as assignments to attribute dictionary keys. That is, use self.__dict__['name'] = x, not self.name = x; because you're not assigning to __dict__ itself, this avoids the loop:

I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak.

You can get CUT UP, DRESSED UP, MADE UP, DRUGGED UP, but at the end of the day you are the MAN or WOMAN God made you.

In writing, you learn about the mystery of yourself. In reading you learn about the mystery of the world. Do both and you'll learn much.

As a writer you have as many bosses as you have readers...though in the end, you must answer to yourself.

Writing is the gateway to learning about one's self. Reading is the gateway to learning about the world.

The greatest act of self-education I've ever undertaken has been to become a writer.

There are authors who write to communicate, there are authors who write to impress themselves.

In the fire of his embrace, all that was her ceased to exist. Only what was God remained. I am. The cloisterbell, the voice of Christ. He spoke again: I am. She tried to obey but was frozen in beauty, like a fly trapped in amber. She could not move. Nothing exists apart from me. Self had been an illusion, a dream. God dreaming.