Quotes About Self

If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will.

Across the Atlantic, in another theatre of the identity wars, the British prime minister was narrowing the definition of Britishness to exclude multiplicity, internationalism, the world as the location of the self. Only little England would do to define the English.

Yet I myself am a discontinuous being, not what I was meant to be, no longer what I was.

they have nowhere else to go, and nobody else to be

Construction work was the art of making the city become aware of itself as a fragile organism at the mercy of forces against which there was no appeal.

because the trouble with trying to escape yourself is that you bring yourself along for the ride.

Ask me how I can afford it." Riya fell into the trap and asked. "Oh, I'm now a transbillionaire," came the reply. "I identify as rich and so consequently I am.

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

The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us are ourselves.

he perceived that this memory-jumbled rag-bag of material was in fact the very heart of her, her self-portrait, the way she looked in the mirror when nobody else was in the room...

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.

We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can't.

The feeling that we call "I" is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.

if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.

It may not be coincidental that [you] use phrases like 'self conscious' when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you.

You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts.

wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one's own advice.

We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn't exist.

Our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts *as thoughts,* as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one's head.

Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self—the sense that there is a thinker behind one's thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience—is an illusion. The feeling that we call "I" is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. Consider

Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is.