Quotes About Self

Le sommeil est le seul endroit où elle semble être à l'abri d'elle-même.

Rouche era fatto così, era costantemente in ritardo sulla versione migliore di se stesso.

Un ser humano es un condensado de autoficción.

It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.

Pilgrimage always involves both an exterior and interior journey. Any travel can be a pilgrimage, regardless of the destination or whether or not there even is a destination. The difference between a pilgrim and a tourist is the intention of attention and openness to God. This transforms a trip into a pilgrimage, and the result is that the self that sets out on pilgrimage will not be the same as the self that returns.

Leaving the self out of Christian spirituality results in a spirituality that is not well grounded in experience. It is, therefore, not well grounded in reality. Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but it will always leave a gap between appearance and reality. This is dangerous to the soul of anyone—and in spiritual leaders it can also be disastrous for those they lead.

Truly transformational knowledge is always personal, never merely objective. It involves knowing of, not merely knowing about. And it is always relational. It grows out of a relationship to the object that is known—whether this is God or one's self.

With the self that is created in God's likeness rejected, our false self is the self we develop in our own likeness. This is the person we would like to be—a person of our own creation, the person we would create if we were God. But such a person cannot exist, because he or she is an illusion

The secret place where we encounter God in a truly transformational way is in our inner self. Prayer is meeting God in the darkness and solitude of that secret place. Nothing less than such an encounter with God in the depths of our soul will provide access to the deep knowing of both God and self that is our true home.

The self that God persistently loves is not my prettied-up pretend self but my actual self—the real me. But, master of delusion that I am, I have trouble penetrating my web of self-deceptions and knowing this real me. I continually confuse it with some ideal self that I wish I were.

The more we identify with our psychologically and socially constructed self, the more deeply we hide from God, ourselves and others.

It is surprising how we fight against Love's accepting what we do not want to accept in ourselves—our defective, wounded, malicious self. But what a transformation when we can accept this poor self and allow love in!

there are many false ways of achieving uniqueness. These all result from attempts to create a self rather than receive the gift of my self-in-Christ.

The mystery of the Christian gospel is that our deepest, truest self is not what we think of as our own separate self but the self that is one with Christ. This is the reason that the self that embarks on the journey of Christ-following is not the self that arrives.

Unless we spend as much time looking at God as we spend looking at our self, our knowing of our self will simply draw us further and further into an abyss of self-fixation.

My body may be male or it may be female, but I am neither — I am me.

We are projects of collective self-creation.

Adventure is not outside a man it is within.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

Un corpuscolo trasparente brillava in me, una scintilla, dorata, luminosa. Lo sapevo: ero io, la mia anima, la mia essenza, il senso della mia esistenza. È nata con me, pensavo, e con me morirà... e non sapevo che avrei potuto sopravviverle a lungo, divenire io stessa un'esiliata, un essere umano inaridito. E una bugiarda... che candidamente senza batter ciglio, osa dire: io.

Perchè il coraggio,secondo lei,è assecondare i desideri della propria anima

Oh, to be young. To still be one's own hero.

Furthermore, he admonishes us: "If you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself."111

The ego, or ordinary mind, is what develops after we are born. In part, it comes from inside but mostly from the outside—through our interactions with our parents, significant others, and our environment. We introject parts of them, which becomes a false self that gets enmeshed with our true self.