Quotes About Self

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.

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is—is nothing, yet at the same time is one with everything. DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD

I am suggesting is that the past, as we remember it, has little to do with causal or determining factors that have in some way made, or influenced, us as we are today. Rather, the remembered past provides us with the means to maintain, or validate, who we are today and to give focus and direction to who we might wish to become at some future point in time.

There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.

Nothing expresses Kafka's innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of "writing as a form of prayer": he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

If we are inherently spiritual creatures, we are by our nature creative beings, yet we live in the fear that if we aspire to be more we will discover ourselves to be less.

Though we may create many beautiful works of art, the most important works of art to which we will ever give ourselves are the lives we live.

We do not see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.

We blame our partners for failing to make us whole.

Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. Mexican essayist Octavio Paz describes eroticism as a thirst for otherness.1 So often, the most intoxicating other that people discover in the affair is not a new partner; it's a new self.

There is beauty in an image that highlights a connection to oneself, rather than a distance from one's partner.

It's not our desires that are different today, but the fact that we feel we deserve—indeed, we are obligated—to pursue them. Our primary duty is now to ourselves—even if it comes at the expense of those we love. As Pamela Druckerman points out, "Our high expectations for personal happiness might even make us more likely to cheat. After all, aren't we entitled to an affair, if that's what it takes to be fulfilled?

Home, marriage, and motherhood have forever been the pursuit of many women, but also the place where women cease to feel like women.

Betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative—the "internal structure that helps us predict and regulate future actions and feelings [creating] a stable sense of self," as psychiatrist Anna Fels defines it.

We are willing to concede that the future is unpredictable, but we expect the past to be dependable. Betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative—the "internal structure that helps us predict and regulate future actions and feelings [creating] a stable sense of self," as psychiatrist Anna Fels defines it.

Everything that's happening, is happening inside the self. And whatever the self is, it is not William Harding the movie actor or the adulterer. Whatever the self is will not die when your body has worms crawling through your eye sockets.

The human animal is remarkably adept at seeing itself as the hero, no matter what the story.

Eu nu sunt eu. Eu sunt altul. Sunt unul într-altul.

People don't change, their situations change. My circumstances can improve or grow worse but it's always myself in the midst of them, unchanged in my private essence.

Deocamdat?, nu avem decât siguranÈ›a unei autenticit??i; aceea a inautenticit??ii noastre. A fi autentic înseamn? a te tr?da fa?? de o sum? infinit? de tr?iri posibile.

Ce matin, quand tu t'es regardé dans la glace tu ne t'es pas vu. C'est parce que je n'étais pas encore là. (IX, 59)

HOGAN-No, I wouldn't think it, but my motto in life is never trust anyone too far, not even myself.

À medida que a mídia convencional tradicional é substituída por uma imprensa personalizada, a internet torna-se um espelho de nós mesmos. Em vez de usá-la para buscar notícias, informação ou cultura, nós a usamos para SERMOS de fato a notícia, a informação e a cultura.

Good things might happen in your life or bad things might happen, sometimes terrible things, but no matter what happens, your soul is your own. And no one and nothing can stop you.