Quotes About Self

One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence.

In case you forgot, my name is Zach Wells. It would not be so strange or awfully bad if you had forgotten.

fortune is not in time or place or things; but, good or bad, in the man's own self for him alone to find and prove.

Y vos? -Yo soy cosa mía.

We are really competing against ourselves, we have no control over how other people perform.

So who are you today?

The "talking cure" for trauma survivors should give way to the unspoken voice of the silent, but strikingly powerful, bodily expressions as they surface to "sound off" on behalf of the wisdom of the deeper self.

I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.

The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others, and no one thinks about reforming himself.

If you've recently learned that you have a brain tumor, keep this in mind: You are a statistic of one.

A brain tumor can radically change your self-identity. Even if your tumor is removed and you are doing well, you may continue to see yourself as someone who is very different from other people.

Androgyny was a subject of some interest in Balzac's time. The Girodet painting of Endymion for which the castrato Zambinella served, in Balzac's fiction, as a far-off model offers a visual androgyny. And perhaps androgyny is a metaphor for the artist who creates life from his sole self and body.

if you don't desire anything, the world is without appeal, it loses its beauty. You lack for everything, yet nothing now triggers the need to devour, to incorporate, to make the beautiful object one's own. If the self 's relation to the external world no longer is subtended by desire, it loses all meaning. Raphaël's life is a kind of vegetation, a life without movement or meaning.

We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one. The memories we organize meaningfully become those that are better remembered. Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effect shaping new memories to fit our established constructs of the world and ourselves.

I only feel like myself when I am alone.

I think therapy is a rather misguided notion of capitalist societies whereby the self-indulgent examination of one's life supersedes the actual living of said life.

It is a shame that we so quickly lose that ability to believe in things; it limits the opportunities we have to transform ourselves, to save ourselves, for it puts the awful burden of transforming and saving ourselves on ourselves. Once you stop believing, you cannot pray, or make sacrifices or pilgrimages, or light candles. You are stuck with yourself, in a world without miracles.

She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of her soul.

Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose also the first announcement of death.

My thoughts are really all I think about.

Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

Political policies determine how the human race confronts this crisis. War doesn't have that ability. War has only one outcome. War is stupid, Ralph. It is the desecration of the human spirit, martyring yourself for someone else's dream. It is for people who do not believe in themselves.

we see the self as originally an extension of experience of the other.

Mentalization is intrinsically linked to the development of the self, to its gradually elaborated inner organization, and to its participation in human society, a network of human relationships with other beings who share this unique capacity. We have used the term "reflective function" to refer to our operationalization of the mental capacities that generate mentalization (Fonagy, Target, Steele, and Steele 1998).