Quotes About Self

The Buddha denied the existence of persisting selves. At the end of life, the self may dissolve into eternity like salt in the ocean. To some, this might seem distressing. But to lose the lonely self in the ocean of eternity could also be a release, an enlightenment, as the mystics promise.

But what is the soul? Some say it is the self, the I that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is the fingerprint of God.

But look at all those neurons in the arms!" he said. "They may have a radically different style of psychological organization from us. Perhaps in octopus we see intelligence without a centralized self. If you have the design of an octopus," Peter asked, "is there a sense of self at all, a center of experience? If not, that involves imagining something so different from us it might be impossible to think of.

Love makes people narcissists: this, too, Flannery now saw.

The only way for a women to get my attention is to be you

Did we choose love, or did we choose ourselves?

Me moriría si perdía a Gideon, pero me moriría de todos modos si me perdía a mí misma.

I don't trust myself not to fuck this up, and you don't trust that you've got what I need. We trust each other just fine. We can work on the rest together.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

I think I am mad sometimes.

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

Go out and do something. It isn't your room that's a prison, it's yourself.

I am I am I am.

I am myself. That is not enough. --from The Jailer, written 17 October 1962

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant - but this is no indication of the true worth of one's total human identity: past, present and future!

My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.

I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked.

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.