Quotes About Self

If in a relationship there is no tension [meaning no deepening of knowledge of self and others], it ceases to be a relationship and merely becomes a comfortable sleep state, an opiate - which most people want and prefer.

Generosity says a great deal about a person's emotional and spiritual development. When it's hard to give, or it feels like ripping away a part of the self, we are still anchored in our attachments or stories we've created about scarcity. If this applies to you, make friends with the part of you that feels resentful or finds it difficult to give.

Buddhism] takes us beyond a kind of self-centered narcissism because instead of identifying with the content of our experience, we identify with awareness itself.

In the tran­sition to socialism, man "starts to see himself reflected in his work and to understand his full stature as a human being through the object created, through the work accomplished. Work no longer entails surrendering a part of his being in the form of labor power sold, which no longer belongs to him, but represents an expression and extension of himself, a contribution to the common social exist­ence in which he is reflected.

To pray is to learn to believe in in a transformation of self and world, which seems, empirically, impossible.

Life didn't chose you, you chose life

Life's major pursuit is not knowing self . . . but knowing God. . . . Unless God is the major pursuit of our lives, all other pursuits are dead-end streets, including trying to know ourselves. CHARLES R. SWINDOLL (B. 1934)

But at some point, a full-grown woman has to be accountable for her own self, and for the choices she's made.

Listening to one's self as well as to others is a sacred act of healing. There is a higher octave of listening that hears the wisdom within the words.

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me

There's a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you'll be comforted to hear that you're not alone. Most of us have an invisible inner terrible someone who says all sorts of nutty stuff that has no basis in truth.

It creates a secret you're too beautiful to keep

Will you take me as I am? Will you? JONI MITCHELL, "California

you gain. Trust yourself. It's Sugar's golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

Everything but me seemed utterly certain of itself. The sky didn't wonder where it was.

She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.

Trust yourself. It's Sugar's golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

I felt it in a way I hadn't in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.

planting a root in the very center of my rootlessness.

Trust youtself. It's Sugar's golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true

We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick.

There's a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you'll be comforted to hear that you're not alone.