Quotes About Self

It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person

None of us know our real names.

we all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were traits that everyone has. We selectively encouraged or repressed traits, so for most of our history we have reinforced gender. But in our deepest selves we were always both.

Consciousness is the hard problem.

Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too.

no one else can live your life for you.

Ship, are you conscious now?" "My speaking establishes a subject position that might be conscious.

Sometimes," she said, wiping her eyes, "sometimes I wish I could stop being Toitovna. I get so tired of it, of everything that I've done." Michel sat beside her. "We're locked in our selves to the end. This is the price one pays for thought. But which would you rather be—convict, or idiot?

But to some people home was home, a complex of feeling far beyond rationality, a sort of grid or gravitational field in which the personality itself took its geometrical shape. While for others, a place was just a place, and the self free of all that, the same no matter where it was. One kind lived in the Einsteinian curved space of home, the other in the Newtonian absolute space of the free self.

think? The narcissism of small differences.

There was so much more going on than any one person could know, reality was so much bigger than the self, that it was alarming to contemplate. This explained the error: one felt the vastness and shrunk in on oneself like a snail's horns, instinctively trying to protect one's mind. And yet there was no real harm in it, this contact with the larger reality.

When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us—or else the present becomes a meaningless blaze of color and sound, in which no two humans, great elongate beings, will be able to do more than touch at their very lips, their spatial selves—no one will ever truly understand another. To love the past is to become fully human.

Even the night sky frightens the narcissist, as presenting impossible-to-deny evidence of a world exterior to the self. Narcissists therefore tend to stay indoors, live in ideas, and demand compliance and assent from everyone they come in contact with, who are all regarded as servants, or ghosts. And as death approaches, they do their best to destroy as much of the world as they can.

La consciencia se entiende tan poco que ni siquiera puede definirse de manera apropiada. El yo es algo escurridizo, buscado con denuedo, aferrado con fuerza, quizá con algo de miedo, una especie de desesperado abrazo al primer atisbo de consciencia, consciencia incluso de las impresiones sensoriales, para que uno pueda tener algo a lo que aferrarse. Para detener el tiempo. Para contener a la muerte. Esta es la fuente del fuerte sentido del yo. Quizá.

God hoeft ons niet te straffen. Hij geeft ons gewoon genoeg tijd van leven om het zelf te doen. pag. 341

They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves. Not always, but at least occasionally, it can break our obsession with the self.

Jeg er ikke frisk andre Steder end i Hodet.

Det er for øvrig ikke tvil om at det skal en viss grad av hjærnetomhet til for å kunne gå og være varig tilfreds med sig selv og alt.

porque es tu propio interior el que constituye la fuente del dolor y de la alegría.

Who am I now among men? Or am I lost already? Am I nothing already? And I cry out and call my name to hear if it still lives.

I had become, as it were, too languid to control or lead myself whither I would go. A swarm of tiny noxious animals had bored a way into my inner man and hollowed me out.

Mortal, if there's one thing I've learned in all my years, it's this: lies are curses you place on yourself.

lies are curses you place on yourself.

Mortal, if there's one thing I've learned in all my years, it's this: lies are curses you place on yourself.