Quotes About Self

Was life always like that? she wondered. A game of hide and seek in which you only occasionally found the person you wanted to be?

We are all always the heroes of our stories, or the villains--we never play a bit part. [Édouard Manet]

The notion of characters, as the traditional form of the novel, is only one of the compromises by which the writer, drawn out of himself by literature in search of its essence, tries to salvage his relations with the world and himself.

Whoever wants to remember himself must entrust himself to forgetfulness, to the risk that absolute forgetfulness is, and the beautiful chance that memory then becomes.

One's thinking about me makes me feel this self; one's not thinking about me leaves me in this self that exceeds me."-"At least disappear in this thought.

Escribir será, en el libro, volverse legible para todos y, para sí mismo, indescifrable?

The journal represents the series of reference points which a writer establishes in order to keep track of himself when he begins to suspect the dangerous metamorphosis to which he is exposed. It is a route that remains viable; it is something like a watchman's walkway upon ramparts: parallel to, overlooking, and sometimes skirting around the other path—the one where to stray is the endless task. Here true things are still spoken of.

There is already a kind of presence of the other in me.

If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that 'one' perceives in me, and not that I perceive.

I am, as a sensing subject, full of natural powers of which I am the first to be filled with wonder. Thus I am not, to recall Hegel's phrase, a 'hole in being,' but rather a hollow, or a fold that was made and that can be unmade.

Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become.

But where are these reference events and these landmarks themselves? They refer us to others, and the answer satisfies us only because we do not attend to it, because we think we are 'at home.' The question would arise again and indeed would be inexhaustible, almost insane, if we wished to situate our levels, measure our standards in their turn, if we were to ask: but where is the world itself? And why am I myself? Am I really alone to be me? Have I not somewhere a double, a twin?

The subject is not so much the intelligent subject as the desiring subject.

Each one can be, according to the moment, I or You or They....Insofar as we live in language, we are not only I; we haunt all grammatical persons, as we are at their intersection, at their crossroads, at their tuft.

A pre-self, a latent ego that remains in ignorance of itself, because it has not yet encountered in others a limit to the self.

Existence turning back upon itself but without succeeding in carrying itself away.

The person himself must be understood as institution, not as consciousness of...

What is at issue is to recognize the operation in us which is us and which is not ours.

My possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive...in short, I am never at one with myself.

Until three months, the infant does not have the concept of his own body but only an impression of incompleteness.

There is a paradox here: the paradox of a total being which is, in advance, everything which we can be and do, and yet which would not be it without us, and which thus needs to be augmented by our own being. Our relation with being involves a double sense, the first according to which we belong to it, the second according to which it belongs to us.

It is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder.

I can never say 'I' absolutely.

Language is a surpassing, operated by the subject on significations he has laid down, stimulated by the use made of words around him. Language is an act of transcending. Thus, we cannot consider it to simply be a container of thought; we must see in it an instrument of conquest of self through contact with others.