Quotes About Self

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen

The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values.

A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body. The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought, and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.

And it isn't enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence.

When a woman doesn't live sufficiently through her body, she comes to see the body as an enemy.

Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes).

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.

Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

when she looked longer at herself in her new dress, it was she but she living a different life, the life she would have lived if she had stayed in Prague.

Estuve tanto tiempo mirándome al espejo que al final me convencí de que lo que veía era yo.

Sabina was now by herself. She went back to the mirror, still in her underwear. She put the bowler hat back on her head and had a long look at herself. She was amazed at the number of years she had spent pursuing one lost moment.

She desired her own body, newly discovered, intimate and alien beyond all others, incomparably exciting.

What is unbearable in life is not being, but being one's self. To live, there is no happiness there. Living: carrying around the world one's painful self. But being, being is happiness. Being: to transform into a fountain, a stone basin in which the universe descends like a lukewarm rain - Postface by François Ricard, translated from French

Nel vivere non c'è alcuna felicità. Vivere: portare il proprio io dolente per il mondo. Ma essere, Essere è felicità. Essere: trasformarsi in una fontana, in una vasca di pietra, nella quale l'universo cade come una tiepida pioggia.

Se buscan así mismos en las mujeres, buscan su ideal y se ven repetidamente desengañados porque un ideal es como sabemos, aquello que nunca puede encontrarse

El hombre no es más que su imagen. Los filósofos pueden decirnos que es irrelevante lo que el mundo piense de nosotros, que sólo vale lo que somos. Pero los filósofos no comprenden nada. En la medida en que vivimos con la gente, no somos más que lo que la gente piensa que somos.

Porque o homem pensa e a verdade escapa-lhe. Porque quanto mais os homens pensam, mais o pensamento de um se afasta do outro. E, finalmente, porque o homem nunca é aquilo que pensa ser.

la ilusión que nos hace considerar la situación de nuestra vida como un simple decorado, una circunstancia contingente e intercambiable por la que transita nuestro 'yo', independiente y constante.

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.