Quotes About Self

It [the self] is rather a process, continuously created and recreated in each social situation that one enters, held together by the slender thread of memory.

In short, one can doubt big and important, or small and unimportant, things. One can harbor doubts about oneself, the world at large, or God. What these cases have in common is that they question whether something or someone is reliable, trustworthy, and meaningful—that is, whether something or someone is "true." Doubt and truth, in other words, are about relationships.

An image, a dance step, a song may function from time to time as entertainment, but the root and full practice of the arts lies in the recognition that art is power, an instrument of communion between the self and all that is important, all that is sacred.

The aim is not therefore to liberate some 'essential self' by throwing off the burden of government and the State, but to develop the self in creative and voluntary relations with others.

Some people have so much respect for their superiors they have none left for themselves.

To the degree we're not living our dreams, our comfort zone has more control of us than we have over ourselves.

Whatever we think of as "self" we will protect and maintain. If it's a conceptual self, and likely it is, then we end up with mind protecting mind. This produces a rather "introverted" self-mind creating thoughts and perceptions in its own image. When self becomes confused with mind, and mind becomes seen as the self, the mind's self-serving activities end up creating an experience of reality that is entirely self-referential.

We confuse being some thing with Being.

Once a conceptual identity occupies the place of "self," this is what we think we are "being.

You don't get your self mixed up with any other self. Of course, the mind must also protect, maintain, and perpetuate itself—if it gets lost or damaged, it can't do its job. The mind unceasingly promotes the interests of the one who "possesses" it, and all its mental/emotional activity is calculated to get this one body-mind through every moment of life in the most secure manner it can conceive.

it seems that the conceptual activity that is created to serve the self has become the self.

Again, I invite you to consider that if you can identify with character traits, qualities, thinking, or experiences other than what you identify with now, then you must not actually be any of these elements. If this is so, who are you? What are you? If you try to pin down who you really are, you will search your mind and attempt to grab onto an idea, or feeling, or sense. Yet that very idea, feeling, or sense itself can be let go, and so it can't be you either. See how this works?

when the mind serves "the self" it is actually serving something of its own making—a conceptual self.

Whatever we think of as "self" we will protect and maintain. If it's a conceptual self, and likely it is, then we end up with mind protecting mind.

When self becomes confused with mind, and mind becomes seen as the self, the mind's self-serving activities end up creating an experience of reality that is entirely self-referential.

Remember, mind has no interest in what's true—its job is to keep you alive while maintaining an identifiable sense of self. To do this, it not only creates and identifies with physical and mental-emotional activities, it also builds on past experience and any previously established conceptual identity. You're still alive and you're still you, so mind will naturally protect and promote all the beliefs behind the activities that keep you that way.

The original function of mind is to do a job, the essence of which is to keep you alive and successfully being you.

The erotic state – again, a mixture of concentration and spontaneity – is a hypnoidal state, probably the most powerful kind that we are capable of experiencing, and it is in this condition that unexpected regions of the self are revealed, as the majority of people know from experience.

To let someone make you angry is always a mistake.

The other terror," he says, "the other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.

The true vocation for every human being is, as Kierkegaard said, "the will to be oneself."5

God never asks us to annihilate the self. We are not to become "non-persons" when we become Christians. The very opposite is true. God intends our deeper, truer self, which he created, to blossom as we follow him.

way. Part of the sanctification process of the Holy Spirit is to strip away the false constructs we have accumulated and enable our true selves to emerge.

I truly believe the greatest gift we can give the world is our true self living in loving union with God.