Quotes About Self

I'm not worrying about the environment at the moment. I'm having enough trouble with my own.

dolls have no identity

I climb to the very top step and look behind me at the wall of memories. Who are we in the end? A collection of photos? How do we know what is truly lived if we cannot remember it?

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not virtue. It was a disguise.

What is man's chief enemy Each man is his own.

The tension between "yes" and "no," between "I can" and "I cannot," makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

What I brought to Dr. Schachtel was not a condition or a situation but a poetics. I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel. Of course, that's what all patients want, but the irony was that with me it might have worked. It might have been the shortest, or the only, way through my defenses, because I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.

We reproach people for talking about themselves but it is the subject they treat best.

Our passions are ourselves.

Nevertheless, I am greatly moved by my passions at times, and it has more than once been my fate to lose my sleep for the sake of a few pages written by some forgotten monk or printed by some humble apprentice of Peter Schoeffer. And if these fierce enthusiasms are slowly being quenched in me, it is only because I am being slowly quenched myself. Our passions are ourselves. My old books are me. I am just as old and thumbworn as they are.

Sammen finder vi ikke hinanden, men vi begynder måske at finde os selv.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.

And when man faces destiny, destiny ends and man comes into his own.

I wish I could change my sex as easily as I can change my shirt.

Partir pour le pôle intérieur de soi-même.

Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?

I will be like Nijinksi, who was taken last year to the Russian ballet, and could not comprehend what spectacle he was viewing. I will be alone, quite alone in myself, indifferent to all the world's ballets.

I have played along with the music just for a second, and now I don't know what to think of suicide, for if I want to separate myself from myself the exit is from this side and, I spitefully add, the entry, the reentry is on the other side.

Who goes there? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?

Qui vive? Est-ce vous, Nadja? Est-il vrai que l'au-delà, tout l'au-delà soit dans cette vie? Je ne vous entends pas. Qui vive? Est-ce moi seul? Est-ce moi-même?

O mundo é o verdadeiro espelho em que o homem se busca. A arte não passa de um reflexo em que ele se encontra.

Minha morte só tomará de mim eu mesmo; é por isso que me tomará tudo e não me tomará nada, já que não haverá mais ninguém para ter perdido o que quer que seja.

We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.