Quotes About Self

The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead.10 There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself.

Once the person begins to look to his relationship to the Ultimate Power, to infinitude, and to refashion his links from those around him to that Ultimate Power, he opens up to himself the horizon of unlimited possibility, of real freedom.

flexibility of the self was the achievement of a rare maturity

In Christendom he too is a Christian, goes to church every Sunday, hears and understands the parson, yea, they understand one another; he dies; the parson introduces him into eternity for the price of $10—but a self he was not, and a self he did not become….

We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments…. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities.

We did not create ourselves, but we are stuck with ourselves.

Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know that the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person's relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it.

the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness.

Some are more fortunately endowed to set the implicit tone for the performance because they present a model self. The less fortunate are obliged to dance a lifetime to the performance cues of others.

The human ego would have to become strong enough to die; and strong enough to set aside guilt… . [F]ull psychoanalytic consciousness would be strong enough to cancel the debt [of guilt] by deriving it from infantile fantasy.7

But the whole idea of knowledge, even, or especially, of oneself and one's own inner states, attained by direct contact and not dependent on theoretical and conceptual assumptions, is absurd.

Going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that.

There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.

She said nothing is done to oneself that one does not accept and that if I loved someone it would take it all away.

There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.

Tom," Ara said. "All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were Impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care. Now that you have ceased to be careful of yourself I must ask you to be, please. For us and for the ship.

He talked of his work as something altogether apart from himself. There was nothing conceited or braggartly about him.

The melon of Castile is for self abuse. The melon of Valencia for eating.

Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out.

All art is only done by the individual. The individual is all you ever have and all schools only serve to classify their members as failures.

She said that nothing is done to oneself that one does not accept and that if I love someone it would take it all away. What

Here he was, settled on the island, when he could as well be in Africa. Hell, he thought, I can always go there. You have to make it inside of yourself wherever you are. You are doing all right at that here.

all good things come from what is inside you.

True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.