Quotes About Self

The first step when learning the Alexander Technique is to try to become more aware of yourself as you go about your daily activities as well as being more aware of what you are thinking as you do them.

The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.

A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators.

The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose.

One buries treasure in the belief that it will be needed in the future. It is far better to act with charity and goodness. One who controls himself builds up hidden treasure that no thief can steal.

The origin of the word "body" is the Anglo-Saxon "bodig" meaning abode. Which is what the physical body is, you see, Robert. A transient dwelling for the real self.

And to kill one's self is to violate the law because it deprives that self of working out the needs of its life.

With words I have knit my shroud and will bury myself therein

There were the men who gave and took death in battle. There were the other men who shuffled papers and cooked beans and such, logistic support for the fighters. The army could keep them separate. In a ship, they all went into battle together. You could not make the distinction between man and man. It had to be made within each man, and each man had constantly to make it for himself.

For a moment, looking felt like something that happened to you rather than something you did. Not 'Are you who I think you are?' Am I who you think I am?

They are, in fact, like nothing but themselves. They are the crowns of five white spruces laden with cones, bending in the wind as they do every day of their existence. Likeness is the sole problem of men.

Maybe they're not scared of different. Maybe they're scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.

We are not born familiar. At best, familiar waits for us down the run of years. Familiar is what he can become to her only through life. But familiar to herself, already, looking on him.

What you love more than your own life must finally belong to you. What you come to know, better than you know your own way home, is yours.

legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best interests.

Dorothy doesn't mind skipping the author's philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim.

Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.

We live suspended between love and ego.

Which is bigger, outer space or inner?

the ordeal of developing new selves will not be seriously entertained, much less embarked upon, until [people] are forced into it by the partial destruction of their former selves.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.

Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.