Quotes About Self

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life.

To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the idea of yourself.

The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies, and that's where I found my material, in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired, you don't come home your best self.

The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.

If you think that life has passed you by, or, even worse, that you are living someone else's life, you can still prove the experts wrong. T

I myself am my only obstacle to perfection," wrote Kierkegaard.

The more we know of the history of the universe, the more we know about ourselves.

I am, therefore I write.

The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).

We are the products of editing, rather than authorship.

The real challenge the rich young man faced was not just giving up his possessions, but giving up himself. The last command Jesus says ("Come, follow me") is the one that we so often overlook and think that he must have left Jesus simply because he liked his green bills.

The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: "Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,'I have a body.' There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave.

In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.

First of all, be what you are.

Pride has no intrinsic substance, being no more than the name given to the soul devouring itself.

He felt more cheerful, revived by the journey, released from himself and his poor life, uplifted by thoughts of the infinite.

Well, you have the right to make a sacrifice of yourself, but I'll be damned if I'll let you sacrifice me!

Someone else's vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it 'cause in the end it's all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself.

You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.

Someone else's vision will never be as good as you own vision of yourself. Live and die with it, because in the end, that's all you have. Lose it and lose yourself and everything else.

I think it's very empowering to be able to have a career and to be a mother. It gives you an amazing sense of self.

What does it matter who a person is or who they have been? Let them think what they like. We're all so many people, aren't we, nowadays? So confusing it is, I don't know how anyone keeps track. There are the people we are inside, then the people we used to be, then there are the people other people think we are.

We have met the enemy and he is us.