Quotes About Self

We don't have to allow stereotypical notions or past experiences to immediately alter our personal future.

Slaves hung on determinedly to their selves, to their love of family, their wholeness. A shoemaker on the South Carolina Sea Islands expressed in his own way: I'se lost an arm, but it hasn't gone out of my brains.

Remember, to be radical is simply to grasp the root of the problem. And the root is us.

Existence is violent, I exist, therefore I'm violent. . . in that way.

He had come so far from himself that I don't think he knew who he was anymore.

For all his Caribbean clothes and his Madison Avenue manners, even with his surfside apartment and his Alfa Romeo roadster, there was so much Kansas in Sanderson that it was embarrassing to see him deny it.

If you ask me, any religion that takes the end of the world as one of its central tenets is more or less bogus. In my view, the only thing that ever 'ends' is the individual.

Detachment from the finite self or attachment to the whole of things—we can state the phenomenon either positively or negatively. When it occurs, life is lifted above the possibility of frustration and above ennui—the third threat to joy—as well, for the cosmic drama is too spectacular to permit boredom in the face of such vivid identification.

All the basic principles of Bhakti yoga are richly exemplified in Christianity. From the Hindu point of view, Christianity is one great brilliantly lit highway toward God, not greater than other paths, but more clearly marked. On this path God is conceived differently than in jnana yoga, where the guiding image was of an infinite sea of being underlying the waves of our finite selves. This sea typified the all-pervading Self, which is a much within us as without.

The word my always implies a distinction between the possessor and what is possessed; when I speak of my book or my jacket, I do not suppose that I am those things. But I also speak of my body, my mind, or my personality, giving evidence thereby that in some sense I consider myself as distinct from them as well. What is this I that possesses my body and mind, but is not their equivalent?

A lamp can be covered with dust and dirt to the point of obscuring its light completely. The problem life poses for the human self is to cleanse the dross of its being to the point where its infinite center can shine forth in full display. p22

Everything I do for my private wellbeing adds another layer to my ego, and in thickening it insulates me more from God.

Dying's an art, and at our age we ought to be learning it. It helps to have seen someone who really knew how. Helen knew how to die because she knew how to live—to live now and here and for the greater glory of God. And that necessarily entails dying to there and then and tomorrow and one's own miserable little self.

All you have to do is give people what they want, reflect themselves back into their own eyes, and they will fall over to crush money into your outstretched hand.

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

But of course, it had all been her – by her and about her, and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky

I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness...Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self...God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.

Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

Love wasn't possible without a self, and nor was thinking.

She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.

Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually. So what's the use of

My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth.

However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. We may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.