Quotes About Self

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

We are all aliens to ourselves.

Every time Sachs posed for a picture, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending to be who he was. After a while, it must have had an effect on him. (…) They say that a camera can rob a person of his soul. In this case, I believe it was just the opposite. With this camera, I believe that Sachs's soul was gradually given back to him.

At fifty-seven, I felt old. Now, at seventy-four, I feel much younger than I did then.

One of the odd things about being himself ... was that there seemed to be several of him, that he wasn't just one person but a collection of contradictory selves, and each time he was with a different person, he himself was different as well.

Sami sebe sme všetci cudzincami, a ak vôbec máme po?atie o tom, kto sme, je to iba preto, že žijeme v o?iach druhých.

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others.

?nsan bir kez kendine kar?? olmaya ba?lad? m?, ba?ka herkesin de kar?? oldu?unu dü?ünür.

Hiç kimse bir ba?kas?n?n s?n?r?ndan içeri giremez, nedeni de basittir: Hiç kimse kendine ula?amaz da ondan.

Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that.

Nessuno può sconfinare in un altro - per il semplice motivo che nessuno può accedere a se stesso.

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than this surface to others.

When he talks about the world, then, he is referring to his world, to the small, circumscribed sphere of his own life, and not to the world-at-large, which is too large and too broken for him to have any effect on it.

Quién eres tú? Y si crees que lo sabes, ¿por qué insistes en mentir al respecto?

B?röm az illanó érzetek palimpszesztje lett, és minden réteg annak a nyomát viselte, aki voltam.

I stood up from my seat and made my way for the exit downstairs. Outside, the early evening assaulted me with light, surrounded me with sudden warmth. This is what I deserve, I said to myself. I've made my nothing, and now I've got to live in it.

a lire belongs only to the person who lives it; life itself will claim the living; to live is to let live.

La única persona con la que sabía cómo comportarme era conmigo mismo; pero verdaderamente yo ya no era nadie, no estaba realmente vivo. Sólo era alguien que fingía estar vivo, un muerto que

Maar is lezen juist niet de kunst van het zelf zien, van het oproepen van beelden in je eigen hoofd? En heeft de schoonheid van het lezen niet alles te maken met de stilte die je omgeeft zodra je je in het verhaal hebt gestort, het stemgeluid van de schrijver die weerklinkt in je hoofd en alle andere geluiden buitensluit?

No hay nada que disimular. Tiene usted derecho a sus propios sentimientos.

Who am I? And how may I become myself?

What distinguishes torture from masochism? In torture, the intensity of the assault on the self can be more severe, limitlessly so. But this isn't the key difference. What really matters is choice. There are no safe words in torture. To voluntarily obliterate one's self, temporarily and under situations of control, is one thing, and it can be blissful.

One reason why doing nothing is so unpleasant is that our thoughts, unfettered by distraction, take us to uncomfortable places. Boredom is the opposite of BDSM: instead of escaping from the self, you're wallowing in it.

Paradoxically, pain seems like something done to us, though in reality we have done it to ourselves, manufacturing the sensation. Whatever we might conceive of as "pain" occurs in the mind.