Quotes About Self

Third and most important, we must begin to make the transformation into the healthy narcissist. Healthy narcissists have a stronger, even more resilient sense of self.

To imagine that we are not always in control of what we do is a frightening thought, but in fact it is the reality.

Let us call this sensation mastery—the feeling that we have a greater command of reality, other people, and ourselves. Although it might be something we experience for only a short while, for others—Masters of their field—it becomes their way of life, their way of seeing the world.

You must alter your very concept of creativity and try to see it from a new angle. Most often, people associate creativity with something intellectual, a particular way of thinking. The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self—our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.

you will feel differently about yourself. Your concept of time will expand and you will realize that if the past lives on in you, what you are doing today, the world you live in, will live on and affect the future, connecting you to the larger human spirit that moves through us all. You in this moment are a part of that unbroken chain. And this can be an intoxicating experience, a strange intimation of immortality.

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

How odd it is, thought March afterwards, to live your life in ignorance of the past, of your world, yourself. Yet how easy to do it! You went along from day to day, down paths other people had prepared for you, never raising your head - enfolded in their logic, from swaddling clothes to shroud. It was a kind of fear. Well, goodbye to that. And good to leave it behind - whatever happened now. - 214

The line between accident and suicide isn't always clearly defined. You could kill yourself without really making up your mind.

In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.

Cultism—like all totalism and fundamentalism—is a reaction against the potential confusions of protean openness. In that sense cultism is reactionary not only in its constraints on the self but on its efforts to stop the flow of history. Expressions of collective proteanism, one of which Václav Havel called "living in truth," can be viewed as a return to the resilience of the self and its dynamic relationship to the historical process.

The Protean Alternative I have stressed the pervasiveness and danger of cultism, but that does not mean it must dominate our future. We are capable of alternatives—even antidotes—that stem from the very structure of the human mind. One such alternative is what I call the protean self, a view of the self as always in process; as being many-sided rather than monolithic, and resilient rather than fixed.

But rather than collapse under these threats and pulls, the self turns out to be surprisingly resilient. It makes use of bits and pieces here and there and somehow keeps going. What may seem to be mere tactical flexibility, or just bungling along, turns out to be much more than that. We find ourselves evolving a self of many possibilities, one that has risks and pitfalls but at the same time holds out considerable promise for the human future.

You never could tell what a man would do when he was drunk, even if that man was your own self.

You never escape the traps you spin yourself.

You could forget who you were if you forgot where you came from, and sometimes the innkeeper's daughter from Emond's Field seemed a stranger to her.

We are always more afraid than we wish to be, but we can always be braver than we expect. Hold on to your heart, and the Aes Sedai cannot harm what is really you, your heart.

If you want to understand another person in some fundamental way you must know where the person is in his or her evolution...the way in which the person is settling the issue of what is 'self' and what is 'other' essentially defines the underlying logic (or 'psychologic') of the person's meanings.

Be careful what you learn because your mind is so powerful that you become what you put in your head.

I've learned the truth and wisdom in rich dad's words. So much of life is out of our control. I've learned to focus on what I do have control over: myself. And if things must change, first, I must change.

treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself.

Along the way, each marveled at how easy it was to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important it would be to further rely on oneself.

everything we knew, everything we felt!' 'Not quite everything,' he said, touching her cheek. 'I'm Jason to you, Bourne to me, because that's the name I was given, and have to use it because I don't have any other. But it's not mine.

And I'd prefer you function the very best you can at that appointment. My interests are extremely selfish, no remissions permitted.

The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.