Quotes About Self

Love is a hollow in us, not the presence of the other.

When I am seated at my table, I can instantly 'visualize' the parts of my body that it conceals from me. As I clench my foot inside my shoe, I can see it. I have this power even for parts of my body that I have never seen.

Does not love consist precisely in the establishment of the mirror relation?...It would then be necessary to say that love is not an illusoon, but...actual alienation. The error lies in believing that it is only an error...The mystery: how one can be non-self with all of one's strength.

Prior to stimuli and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind of inner diaphragm which determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.

This unconscious is to be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back of our 'consciousness,' but in front of us, as articulations in our field. It is 'unconscious' by not being object but by being that through which objects are possible, it is the constellation from which our future may be read.

There is in all expression a spontaneity which will not take orders, not even those which I would like to give to myself.

Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.

over and over, you would like to be recognized according to your own self, your own person, your own heart's inclination-but they always ask only what you have done, and really, if you look at it rationally, they have nothing else by which they can judge your state of mind except the manifestations of that state of mind.

A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact.4

Notice I did not say what people can do--what we can do is merely a consequence of what we can be.

Ich bin nicht Stiller!

The demand that we love our neighbor as ourselves contains as an axiom the demand that we shall love ourselves, shall accept ourselves as we were created.

The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape.

We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.

It is precisely the essential feature of egoism that it does not apprehend the full value of the isolated self. The egoist sees himself only with regard to the others, as a member of society who wishes to possess and acquire more than the others. Self-directedness or other-directedness have no essential bearing on the specific quality of love or hatred. These acts are different in themselves, quite independently of their direction

My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.

The people is dead! Good-day, Self!

Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hope on "institutions

It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State.

For only he who is alive is in the right.

I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.

Ich bin meine Gattung, bin ohne Norm, ohne Gesetz, ohne Muster und dergleichen.

Mensch, es spukt in deinem Kopfe!