Quotes About Self

Joe knew that all human beings are the star of their own very important film, a film in which they are both camera and actor; a film in which they are always playing the fearful and lonely hero who gets up each day hoping to finally strike upon the life they are meant to lead, though they never do.

Am I the same person that I dream about?

The denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual.

Dreams may well be the vehicle of wishes, but the wishes at stake are the insatiable human desires to exceed the isolating and privatizing confines of the self.

My wickedness, as I am in myself, has long appeared to me perfectly ineffable, and infinitely swallowing up all thought and imagination; like an infinite deluge or infinite mountains over my head.

Because if the Will be already inclined, before it exerts its own sovereign power on itself, then its inclination is not wholly owing to itself:

When God spreads his glory, he is not seeking to add to himself, rather, he is just being himself.

Of all kinds of knowledge that we can ever obtain, the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of ourselves, are the most important.

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.

Our life is the creation of our mind

I think these drugs could just as well be called Durkheimogens, given their unique (though unreliable) ability to shut down the self and give people experiences they later describe as "religious" or

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."32

It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person's conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person's own neck and tries to strangle him.13

why did Europeans give it up? Ehrenreich's historical explanation is too nuanced to summarize here, but the last part of the story is the rise of individualism and more refined notions of the self in Europe, beginning in the sixteenth century. These cultural changes accelerated during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. It is the same historical process that gave rise to WEIRD culture in the nineteenth century

Durkheim believed that these collective emotions pull humans fully but temporarily into the higher of our two realms, the realm of the sacred, where the self disappears and collective interests predominate. The realm of the profane, in contrast, is the ordinary day-to-day world where we live most of our lives, concerned about wealth, health, and reputation, but nagged by the sense that there is, somewhere, something higher and nobler.

I am now me more than I ever was. (A Christmas Outing)

happiness comes from taking all the credit and none of the

Tom adjusted his sword and checked his knives and his pistol. If there had been anyone to see his face, they would have seen a man at peace with himself and the world. And if they were wise they would know that such a man was the most dangerous of all opponent - one who fights to preserve love rather than perpetuate hate.

Fear, of course, was always, and in the end only, about itself. (45)

But remember this. When God wants to punish us, he gives us just ourselves to care for.

Without God, there is a danger that we will stay trapped within the prison of the self. As

I—though forced through lack of space to assume the form of a stoic guinea pig crouched between the girl's shoe and the glove compartment—was my usual dignified self.

Despite myself, of course, I also couldn't help being flattered by Lockwood's words of praise.