Quotes About Self

She once read during emotional duress a person's body and soul could actually part. That a person could quite literally be beside herself.

Se le ocurrió que nadie sino él miraría nunca desde sus ojos, que de entre todas las vidas en que podía haber vivido, más numerosas que lo imaginable, esta era la suya, clavada en este único punto del infinito; el resto siempre sería ajeno, él sería yo.

Like many women my age, I am 28 years old.

To lead a human life, a man must have a notion of himself as having a past and a future.

If you are wise, you will never forget that your heart is yours alone. It can be the greatest gift, but never can it be commanded.

There are women in my closet, hanging on the hangers. a different woman for each suit, each dress, each pair of shoes. I hoard clothes. My makeup spills from the bathroom drawers, and there are different women for different lipsticks.

In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of the selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank.

All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.

No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath.

Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn´t exist at all.

Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be all right.

The fear, too, is a fear of yourself: a completely dualistic and contradictory fear. On the one hand, it is the fear that you do not have what it takes to make it, and on the other hand, a possibly greater fear that you do have what it takes, and that by definition you therefore also have a responsibility to do something really big.

If a woman stands in a kitchen rubbing her eyes and pouring coffee with no one there to see her, does she exist? I

We put an extraordinary amount of effort into how we appear, or wish to appear, trying frantically to construct a sense of self out of how we are seen from without. But who are we from within? What makes us who we are? If we stop for a moment and think, Of what do I consist? what is the answer we hear?

The spiritual self is the deepest, most integrated aspect of who we are.

we have few words for spiritual beyond those that refer back to a God. But not believing in a God is not opposed to a belief in an aspect of the self that can be called spiritual. The latter is experienced, and defined, very personally, and is different for each individual.

They are solid, real. I am an object, useful but hollow. The absence of thought fills me up.

Steps Six and Seven are often brushed off, especially by the nonbeliever, because they seem to assume a direct relationship with a personal God. But they really are essential, and reconceptualizing them in a way that allows us to reach their spiritual core—the development of a clear moral self—is crucially important to those of us working the Steps in sobriety.

He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.

The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.

And by the DODO, I mean me.

Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.

Buddhism is originally not a religion of faith in a transcendent deity but a religion of awakening to the true nature of self and others.

Of all existing things some are in our power, and others are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everything which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, everything which is not our own doing." Epictetus, Enchiridion,