Quotes About Self

Hidden there—hidden even from himself—had lain inert for months a mighty passion such as only a great heart

Man worships self: his God is Man; the struggling of the mortal mind To form its model as 'twould be, the perfect of itself to find.

Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others.

Every man is his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.

Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,All centuries but this, and every country but his own.

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

Only the unprotected self can feel joy.

Je n'écris plus, je suis écrite. (p.86)

Minusta tuntuu hyvältä nähdä luuni. Pidän siitä että näen ja tunnen ne. Kun minun ja luitteni välillä on liikaa lihaa, tuntuu kuin jotenkin etääntyisin itsestäni. Ymmärrätkö?

The place where I am is missing from my view. It's like that for everybody. We don't see ourselves in the picture, do we? It's a kind of hole.

The misery I felt was grief. I wanted her back, my old self.

What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself.

The pleasure was in the staging, the idea of ourselves as a repetition of others. I knew this without saying it, felt my femininity as the game of all women, a mysterious identification in which I lost myself.

Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others.

En mayor o menor medida, todos inventamos nuestro pasado.

Para quién narramos, después de todo? Incluso en la soledad de nuestra cabeza existe un supuesto otro, la segunda persona de nuestro discurso.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

The outside also becomes us. A human being is born an unfinished organism and as the person develops experience with others becomes a physical reality. The I and the you are not as neatly separated as the culture likes to believe.

Mirroring makes speech possible; language relies on the reflective quality of I and you through which verbal interaction becomes possible.

Memories that have never been told aren't yet solid stories; they are potential stories. It may be that the interlocutor is the self, as in John Harmon's monologue, but it is always the self in relation to the idea of another, the "I" addressing a "you," because the desire to tell implies that the tale must become comprehensible to a listener.

We can't remember our infancies, but they live in our bodies, and had I not been frail at birth, I would have been someone else, and I would have had other thoughts.

We need to think of the self as a continuum, a steady story over time. The mind is always searching for similarities, associations, repetitions, because they create meaning.

Whether people are besieged by a chemical imbalance or thrown into a panic or depression by a wrenching loss, their inconsistencies also belong to the self.

It's a sorry little fact that we are often as mysterious to ourselves as we are to others.