Quotes About Self

From now on I'm thinking only of me." Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way." "Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?

The soul paints itself in our machines.

254. The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

It also enables us to fill in the blanks of our future self. The way we fill in those blanks is an important element in our overall outlook on life. Fearful, anxious people see troubles ahead and lead their lives dwelling on worst-case scenarios that often do not come to pass. They believe that worrying gave them the power to execute plans that prevented the bad things from happening in the past. But

Changing the content of our memories or altering their emotional tonalities, however desirable to alleviate guilty or painful consciousness, could subtly reshape who we are, at least to ourselves. With altered memories we might feel better about ourselves, but it is not clear that the better-feeling 'we' remain the same as before." —PRESIDENT'S COUNCIL ON BIOETHICS

My notion of personality is pretty simple: it's that your "self," the essence of who you are, reflects patterns of interconnectivity between neurons in your brain.

For example, a threatening stimulus—say, a snake at your feet on a path in the woods—will automatically elicit defensive responses that occur as a result of activation of a defensive survival circuit. This is an a-noetic state that does not have any necessary connection to conscious knowing or the self. However, the same stimulus that triggered the a-noetic state can, and likely will, also result in the retrieval of conscious noetic knowledge (semantic memory) about

The essence of who you are is stored as synaptic interactions in and between the various systems of your brain. As we learn more about the synaptic mechanisms of memory, we learn more about the neural basis of the self.

only a lunatic would fail to distinguish between himself and his representative self. This banal distinction may be most obvious in the workplace, where invariably one must avail oneself of an even-tempered, abnormally industrious dummy stand-in who, precisely because it is a dummy, makes life easier for all the others, who are themselves present, which is to say, represented, by dummies of their own.

A man who is sorry for his sins, is sorry either be cause sin is an evil done to God (malum Deo), or because it is an evil done to himself (malum homini). If his sorrow is inspired by the first-mentioned motive, i. e. perfect charity, which not only loves God as the highest good above all else, but likewise abhors whatever is op posed to Him, he has perfect contrition. 4 All other kinds are necessarily imperfect.

As Kennon Callahan so aptly states, "only you can grow you."6

I am no longer Mendel Singer. I am the remains of Mendel Singer.

Dazzled by the luminosity of logic, she leans back, closing her eyes. She loses herself, she is lost.

What do you want me to do now?" Brackenfur asked miserably. "Stop blaming yourself, to begin with

Ne postoji ama baš ništa ?emu su potrebni ljudi, osim možda samim ljudima.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.

The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

The once-great country into which I'd been born now resembled its former self in name only. It didn't matter who was in charge. Those people were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and everyone knew it.

Raw neural input, from a brain that was not my own.

Sometimes a man imagines that he will lose himself if he gives himself, and keep himself if he hides himself. But the contrary takes place with terrible exactitude.

you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself.

Man's chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him.