Quotes About Self

We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self is enough.

We all believe in many more things than we think, we harbour intolerances, we cherish bloody prejudices, and, defending our ideas with extreme means, we travel the world like ambulatory and irrefragable fortresses. Each of us is a supreme dogma to himself; no theology protects its god as we protect our self; and if we assail this self with doubts and call it into question, we do so only be a pseudo-elegance of our pride: the case is already won.

Meditate but one hour upon the self's nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man," said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect

In order not to be overwhelmed by our accident, we convert even our name into an entity: how can we die when we are called Peter or Paul?

Man is free, save for his depths.

Each of us is entitled to claim the forebears who suit him, who explain him in his own eyes. How often have I not changed ancestors!

How easy it is to believe yourself a god by the heart, and how hard it is to be one by the mind!

Did they relish their role as undesirables? Did they seek to be alone on earth in principle?

but let us remember that lucidity is a condition peculiar to those who by their incapacity to love are as isolated from others as from themselves.

How difficult it is to dissolve oneself in Being!

One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

Of all the bonds which link us to things, there is not one which fails to slacken and dissolve under the influence of suffering, which frees us from everything except the obsession of ourselves and the sensation of being irrevocably individual. Suffering is solitude hypostatized as essence.

Parmenides. Nowhere do I perceive the Being he exalts, and fail to see myself in his sphere, which includes no fault, no place for me.

When I despise myself, I tell myself, in order to shore up my confidence, that, after all, I have managed to maintain myself in being or in a semblance of being, with a perception of things that very few could have endured.

When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

Wisdom? Never was any period so free of it—in other words, never was man more himself: a being refractory to wisdom.

Who among us, left to himself, would not take up space, air itself, and regard himself as its owner?

My quiet time is not a gift I give to God. My quiet time is a gift God gives me. I don't offer him my quiet time. I simply offer him my time, my self. He's the one who provides the quiet spirit.

I'm a wonderful disaster. So are you. We're all a mess. We're in this culture that says take this pill and you'll be happy, go on this diet and you'll be thinner, have your teeth whitened, people will love you more.

Nelly, I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more then I am always a pleasure to myself - but, as my own being.

When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.

Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

Except Thyself may beThine Enemy—Captivity is Consciousness—So's Liberty.