Quotes About Self

Our capacity for self-delusion appears almost infinite.

Whatever you think you are, that's what you are

The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

She was now the center of what surrounded her. All that was not her made space for her.

In the imaginative movement which prompts the impulse to draw repeats implicitly the same pattern...there is a symbiotic desire to get closer and closer, to enter the self of what is being drawn, and, simultaneously, there is the foreknowledge of immanent distance. Such drawings aspire to be both a secret rendezvous and a au-revoir! Alternately and at infinitum.

One could put it another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

I am includes all that has made me so. It's more than a statement of immediate fact: it is already an explanation, a justification, a demand - it is already biographical.

There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he is himself the situation.

to be naked is to be oneself. to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. a naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (the sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) nakedness reveals itself. nudity is placed on display. to be naked is to be without disguises.

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.

I sniff a fire burning without outlet, consuming acrid its own smoke. It's me.

If you believe in the Gospel what you like, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.

The self is simply that warm single point of sentience around which the life of the universe gathers.

Since the earliest period of our life was preverbal, everything depended on emotional interaction. Without someone to reflect our emotions, we had no way of knowing who we were.

We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will.

we all have a number of executive subselves, and the only way we manage to accomplish anything in life is to allow only one subself to take the conscious driver's seat at any given time.

I'm myself, not a label.

According to your sympathy, you will take pleasure in your own happiness or in the happiness of other people but it is always your own happiness you seek.

The dharma teaches us the impermanence of all phenomena, but you cannot prepare yourself for the loss of the phenomenon you love more than yourself.

He lied all the time even when there was no need to lie [...] He needed a _history_, a sense of self. [Burnside on his father, p. 22]

I want to venture a hypothesis that, roughly expressed, goes like this: you cannot learn to love yourself until you find something in the world to love; no matter what it is. A dog, a garden, a tree,a flight of birds, a friend...Because what we love in ourselves is ourselves loving.

Happiness is an inside job.

Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.

Every one of us is, even from his mother's womb, a master craftsman of idols.