Quotes About Self

We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.

Nunca tive outra preocupação verdadeira senão a minha vida interior.

Que mãos estenderei para que universo? O universo não é meu: sou eu.

Life is what we do with it. Trips are travelers. What we see is not what we see, but what we are.

To publish – the socialization of one's self. A vile necessity! But still not a real act, since it's the publisher who makes money, the printer who produces. It at least has the merit of being incoherent.

And then I feel an overwhelming, absurd desire for a kind of Satanism before Satan, a desire that one day – a day without time or substance – an escape leading outside of God will be discovered, and our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in being and non-being.

To associate is to die. Only my consciousness of myself is real for me; other people are hazy phenomena in this consciousness, and it would be morbid to attribute very much reality to them.

I let my mind wander, and I'm sure that what I'm writing I've already written. I remember. And I ask the one in me who presumes to exist if in the Platonism of sensations there might not be another, less vertical anamnesis – another pre-existing life that we vaguely remember but that belongs only to this life… My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and myself?

Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self.

And amid all this confusion I, what's truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I'm the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what's truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls' viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.

To be understood is to prostitute oneself.

I limited and focused my desires to hone and refine them. To reach the infinite – and I believe it can be reached – we need to have a sure port, just one, from which to set out for the Indefinite. Today I'm an ascetic in my religion of myself. A cup of coffee, a cigarette and my dreams can substitute quite well for the universe and its stars, for work, love, and even beauty and glory. I need virtually no stimulants. I have opium enough in my soul.

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept – our own selves – that we love. This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he's the perfect logical expression of the lover. He's the only one who doesn't feign and doesn't fool himself.

Alguien conoce las fronteras de su alma, para poder decir, yo soy yo?

Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, suffers lapses of affirmation, as do all virtues and even all vices.

Durante el día soy un inútil; en la noche soy yo mismo.

I am me again, exactly as I am not.

Não sou nada. Nunca serei nada. Não posso querer ser nada. À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.»

We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.

Revolutionary or reformer – the error is the same. Unable to dominate and reform his own attitude towards life, which is everything, or his own being, which is almost everything, he flees, devoting himself to modifying others and the outside world. Every revolutionary and reformer is a fugitive. To fight for change is to be incapable of changing oneself. To reform is to be beyond repair.

I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

Be pure, not in order to be noble or strong, but to be yourself.

En el fondo, lo que hay en nosotros de doloroso es lo que no somos en realidad y nuestras mayores tragedias corresponden a la idea que tenemos de nosotros mismos.

I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.