Quotes About Self

You have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live, and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.

Todos los dioses, todos los cielos, todos los infiernos, están en ti.

Tehát amikor Jézus azt mondja, hogy szeresd felebarátodat, mint tenmagadat, akkor valójában nem kevesebbet állít, minthogy szeresd felebarátodat, mert Å' te magad vagy.

We can never cease to be ourselves.

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.

Walking to the taffrail, I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus—yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny

You, too! it seemed to say, you, too, shall taste of that peace and that unrest in a searching intimacy with your own self - obscure as we were and as supreme in the face of all the winds and all the seas, in an immensity that receives no impress, preserves no memories, and keeps no reckoning of lives.

Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear—concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only chance—barring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn't so good, on account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad.

No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.

We live as we dream--alone...." ? Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary

No, I'd rather be like myself, bad as I am.

Youth that is fresh enough to believe in guilt, in innocence, and in itself, will always doubt whether it have not perchance deserved its fate.

We live as we dream - alone

Not like Homer would I write, Not like Dante if I might, Not like Shakespeare at his best, Not like Goethe or the rest, Like myself, however small, Like myself, or not at all.

what's left of me if you take my work away? I'm not sure there's anything left." "Whaddya mean?

The mind does not belong to you, but you are responsible for it.

The great discovery in our practice is that, on one level, birth and death, existence and nonexistence, self and other are the great defining themes of our lives. And on another level, it's all just a dance of insubstantial appearances, what the Buddha called "the magic show of consciousness.

No one can practice for us. The Buddhas just point the way.

A healthy self and an empty self are not contradictory; it just appears so because we use the same language to describe two different things. The whole path of meditation is about understanding that the self as an unchanging entity is a fiction, an illusory mental construct.

The expression of emptiness is love, because emptiness means "emptiness of self." When there is no self, there is no other. That duality is created by the idea of self, of I, of ego. When there's no self, there is a unity, a communion. And without the thought of "I'm loving someone," love becomes the natural expression of that oneness.

That which is impermanent is inherently unreliable and unsatisfying. And that which is unreliable and unsatisfying cannot truly be considered to be I or Mine.

When you close your eyes there is the breath, sensations, sounds, thoughts—where is "man" or "woman" except as an idea, a concept?

From the beginning this "self" does not exist, yet because we're so firmly attached to the idea of it, we spend much of our lives defending or enlarging or satisfying this imaginary self. Meditation helps us to see its conceptual nature, to see that in reality it does not exist, that it is simply an idea, an extraneous projection onto what's happening in the moment.

As far as I know, I'm the only Captain Yossarian I know, but that's only as far as I know.