Quotes About Self

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience—the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or "of those who are to be." We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others.

There is even in the most selfish passion a large element of self-abnegation. It is startling to realize that we call extreme self-seeking is actually self-renunciation. The miser, health addict, glory chaser and their like are not far behind in the exercise of self-sacrifice. Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization?

The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending—for making a show—and also a readiness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing mass spectacle. Deprecation

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. [...] The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

There is also this: when we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment.

The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. People

The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves.

Whence come these unreasonable hatreds, and why their unifying effect? They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt and other shortcomings of the self.

with a fading of the individual's creative powers there appears a pronounced inclination toward joining a mass movement. Here the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and a responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist—slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within—drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes.

we all go through changes in search of self!

It's not the disease or infirmity that heals, it's the person.

Uno no tiene por qué pedir disculpas si quiere ser el dueño de su propia alma... para bien o para mal. Cuando ya todo se ha dicho y hecho, es todo cuanto queda.

I am sick of haunting myself from within like an old house. I would be happier as a hunted witch.

You did not have to apologize for wanting to own your own soul. Your soul belonged to you—for better or worse. When all was said and done, it was all you had.

If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves!

Mann ist was mann isst.

La pure intention maligne n'existe pas. Chacun se persuade de bien faire. Le diable se prend toujours pour un ange.

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.