Quotes About Self

My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are.

I believe, do you know, we never stop being what we were, young. We don't shed the young self, we just put on other skins, one cover after another, but somewhere in us is still the self we were before we fell, before we started covering ourselves. And all the rest of our lives, we're trying to go back, we're looking for it, what we lost.

That's what I was gonna do, and I wasn't going to hurt. And if you shut yourself off and say, "This isn't going to hurt me," you can't shut it down without shutting it down totally. I closed myself down so much that I was making it, doing great with surviving – but my soul was completely encased.

Everybody has a shadow self to contend with but most manage to contain it effectively as they settle into their regimented routines of daily living. Rock stars, by contrast, are often actively encouraged to cultivate their darker qualities and that's where the trouble usually starts.

One ascends into profundity, but profundity is nothing but a complication of the shallows, and 'one' is nowhere.

If there is something you want to protect, attack it with measured vigour yourself, thus investing it with replenished force, and pre-empting its annihilation.

I wanted to be alone, not forgotten.

Exposed meant conspicuous, different, not fitting in, not feeling at home, at least not until you learn that your self is your home and no one can take it away.

The troll lives in his bones and walks abroad wearing his skin, even under the sun.

People could not be made to change. It had taken her a long time to learn that. People had to want to change themselves.

Was it her true nature to take from others her own power?

She smiled to herself at the sudden shyness that fell on the two girls as she walked away.

Finding himself,' for modern man, means dissolving himself in any collective entity.

The idea of "the free development of personality" seems admirable as long as one does not meet an individual whose personality has developed freely.

For the trunk of individuality to grow, one must prevent freedom from making the trunk spread out into branches.

To educate man is to impede the "free expression of his personality.

There are fewer ambitious individuals in the world today than individuals who believe they are morally obliged to be ambitious.

Die Idee der "freien Entfaltung der Persönlichkeit" scheint ausgezeichnet, solange man nicht auf Individuen stößt, deren Persönlichkeit sich frei entfaltet hat.

The genius who bemoans and laments himself forgets that he has spared himself the misfortune of mediocrity.

Modern man deafens himself with music in order not to hear himself.

In the end, the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say or think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.

Happiness is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.

Happiness is not easy to find. It's very difficult to find it in yourself — and impossible to find anywhere else.

She, too, could become someone else. Eventually. Or she'd told herself all these years.