Quotes About Self

I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed.

The language by which we have been taught to dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect each other.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.

Self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford to settle for one easy definition, one nearrow individuation of self. At the Bag, at Hunter College, uptown in Harlem, at the library, there was a piece of the real me bound in each place, and growing

I am who I am doing what I came to do.

I thought it'd be easier here, myself, to live like I wanted to, say what I wanted to say, but it isn't. It's just easier not to, that's all.

The way you get people to testify against themselves is not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is to build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves that has not been sanctioned, to reject what is most creative in themselves to begin with, so you don't even need to stamp it out.

When the desire for definition, self or otherwise, comes out of a desire for limitation rather than a desire for expansion, no true face can emerge.

The subject of revolution is ourselves, is our lives.

Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each of us within our hearts knows 'that is not me.

The mother was your friend, you see, but the woman was your enemy, and love between the sexes is strife. Do not think that I gave myself; I did not give, but I took—what I wanted.

He really is the most arrogant person I've ever come across. 'I am, therefore God exists'. ALICE

LAWYER. Justice that destroys itself in seeking to be just!— — —Right, that so often fosters wrong!!! DAUGHTER

Didn't every new thing you did become a part of you, one of your bricks?

So if you think the job really suits you, be you.

Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.

But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.

I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself.

I am. I think. I will.

People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too ... Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.

I think. I am. I will.

A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress.

I am, therefore I'll think