Quotes About Self

The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. ~ Søren Kierkegaard

greatness of that with which he strove. For he who strove with the world became great by overcoming the world, and he who strove with himself became great by overcoming himself, but he who strove with God became greater than all.

The majority of men are curtailed I's; what was planned by nature as a possibility capable of being sharpened into an I is soon dulled into a third person.

Hence it is a superficial view (which presumably has never seen a person in despair, not even one's own self) when it is said of a man in despair, He is consuming himself. For precisely this it is he despairs of, and to his torment it is precisely this he cannot do, since by despair fire has entered into something that cannot burn, or cannot burn up, that is, into the self.

sólo las naturalezas inferiores encuentran en otro la justificación de sus actos, sólo las naturalezas inferiores encuentran las premisas de sus actos fuera de sí mismas.

to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to man, but at the same time it is eternity's demand upon him.

To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.

Jos en tiedä omasta takaa, en tiedä lainkaan.

Whenever the individual after he has entered the universal feels an impulse to assert himself as the particular, he is in temptation (Anfechtung), and he can labor himself out of this only by abandoning himself as the particular in the universal.

The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.

A man?s mind is never all of one thing, nor does he know himself or all his reasons beneath the masks he wears. They deceive even the wearer.

It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness, unless it is that we would rather be crippled by what we lack than risk the pain that is one potential consequence of placing our secret selves in others' hands...to take delight in being loved requires nerve. The Other Side of You

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

What you were is forever who you are.

Until you know who you are you can't write.

I have been so-many too-many persons; life, unlike syntax, allows one more than three.

In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate. - Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.

She'd never shaken off the feeling of being damaged by her ignorance of Love, of what it might be like to be wholly possessed by the archetypal, capitalized djinn, the yearning towards, the blurring of the boundaries of the self, the unbuttoning, until you were open from your adam's-apple to your crotch: just words, because she didn't know the thing.

Somewhere in the existing software there was a bug, a potentially lethal flaw. Nothing less than the unselfing of the self would do. If he could cleanse the whole machine, then maybe the bug, too, would end up in the trash. After that, he could perhaps begin to construct a new man.

he wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate

O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of...

The self was both its origins and its journey.

Between the self and the other, between the visionary and the psychopath, between the lover and his love, between the overworld and the underworld, falls the Shadow.

Who am I? Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes?