Quotes About Self

which my grandmother's true self was not these guests' business; no one's true self was the business of more than a very small number of family members or close friends.

as if there's a clear distinction between real and fake for any of us. Aren't we all performing the role of ourselves?

But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself.

Always resemble yourself.

Perhaps you're a slave to your own idea of yourself.

The mighty question arises upon us, what is one's own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be.

Exactly, I will lay down the law for nobody, not even myself. The thought of death and the afterlife saves me from doing any more. . . . As the thought of Eternity helps me.

T]he secret is that the ego is the devil — not the shadow... there is evil beyond the ego — an archetypal evil — but for most people, it's the ego that's really the problem.

It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake.

She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.

I want to find you, where you don't know your own existence, the you that your common self denies utterly.

She was nobody, there was no reality in herself, the reality was all outside of her, and she must apply herself to it.

You've got very badly to want to get rid of the old, before anything new will appear — even in the self.

The most normal people have the worst subterranean selves.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

Then she fell into that rapture of self-sacrifice, identifying herself with a God who was sacrificed, which gives to so many human souls their deepest bliss.

Not feeling him so much part of herself, but merely part of her circumstances.

My known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.

The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves.

You can idealize or intellectualize. Or, on the contrary, you can let the dark soul in you see for itself. An artist usually intellectualizes on top, and his dark under-consciousness goes on contradicting him beneath. This is almost laughably the case with most American artists.

After a short time, she was not very much interested in being good. Her soul was in quest of something, which was not just being good, and doing one's best. No, she wanted something else: something that was not her ready-made duty. Everything seemed to be merely a matter of social duty, and never of her self. They talked about her soul, but somehow never managed to rouse or implicate her soul. As yet her soul was not brought in at all.

The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover IT, and proceed possibly to fulfill IT. IT being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness.