Quotes About Self

Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.

Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure.

You'll be surprised to see what can collect in a mattress over the months, over the years. Every day, every night of our lives, we're leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves?

Por qué habría de querer yo una fotografía de tal desastre? Me acerque un poco más a ella y vi mi cabeza, mi cabeza, allí dentro, tras la ventana de la cocina. Me hizo pensar, al verme a mí mismo de ese modo. Lo digo en serio: es algo que le hace pensar a uno.

Por qué habría de querer yo una fotografía de tal desastre? Me acerqué un poco más a ella y vi mi cabeza, mi cabeza, allí dentro, tras la ventana de la cocina. Me hizo pensar, el verme a mí mismo de ese modo. Lo digo en serio: es algo que le hace pensar a uno.

I was a swell guy. I enjoyed being me.

I have such a beautiful love for myself—and the sweet part of it—no rivals.

Ljudi kažu da nas ?esto najviše vre?a deo sopstvenog lika u drugom ?oveku.

You would never look at yourself as "evil" no matter what the other fellow thought of what you did. It's in our nature. And that's the great secret of evil. It is never viewed as evil by those who perpetrate the evil.

For Goddsakes, am I, who carries an entire world within me, a body?

And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world.

Just as thinking is the soul speaking to itself (Theaetetus 189e), forcing itself to articulate its reasons and exposing those reasons to evaluation as if to different aspects of its own self, so we enlarge our thinking by bringing others into the dialogue.

The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on. We make ourselves and in so doing are the gods of the small universe of self and the large world of repercussions.

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally.

You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally.

James Baldwin famously wrote, "If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.

The self is...a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on.

I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.

The fairy godmother replied that true magic is to help each thing become its best and most free self.

The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow," she writes. "We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room.

In the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility.