Quotes About Ego

If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.

It was not intelligent to damage the ego of a young boy. You can, with some impunity, insult an older man who has already been humiliated by life itself and will not take to heart the small slights of another human being. But a young man thinks these offences mortal.

Every man measures his own greed.

Dad's Theory of Arrogance--that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway Play.

Dad's "Theory of Arrogance"—that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway play.

Men's pride is situated in their scrotums.

when we were all boarding his helicopter for a trip to Atlantic City, the airlift facility refused to fuel the helicopter. One of the guys took out his own Mobil card and charged $2000 worth of gas." Donald has said, "Once you have enough to eat and live, money is about ego." To survive, he had to let others manage his affairs, which was humbling enough. Harder still was giving up the fantasy

His only cause, ultimately, was himself.

As a pastor, I recognize that in theological terms, narcissists want to be the center of attention, like a god, and have people worship them by paying attention to them, buying the products they promote, and emulating their behavior.

His efforts were always in the service of releasing people from their fixed ideas about who or what they were, about freeing them from attachment to whatever concept they were clinging to, about loosening the hold that the fear-based ego claimed as its birthright.

In the practice of mindfulness, the ego's usual insistence on control and security is deliberately and progressively undermined. This is accomplished by steadily shifting one's center of gravity from the thinking mind to a neutral object like the breath, or in the case of my workshop, the random sounds of the environment.

It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience….

meditation is not just about creating states of well-being; it is about destroying the belief in an inherently existent self.

The ego needs all the help it can get. We can all benefit from getting over ourselves.

Many people, in both the East and the West, believe that shutting down the ego, and the thinking mind, is the ultimate purpose of meditation. The Dalai Lama, rather forcefully, always argues that this is a grave misunderstanding. Ego is at once our biggest obstacle and our greatest hope. We can be at its mercy or we can learn to mold it according to certain guiding principles. Intelligence is a key ally in this shaping process, something to be harnessed in the service of one's progress.

Implicit and explicit throughout the text is the understanding that meditative wisdom does not have to be isolated from daily life. Our need to expand awareness beyond our isolated egos is as necessary in relationships as it is in meditation.

The ego's instinctive favoring of itself is eroded by a sense of the infinite

To flaunt your strength is to make it your weakness.

Those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful.

It's such a simple thing, but in a moment of ego we refuse to put down what we carry in order to open the door. Time and time again, we are offered the chance to truly learn this: We cannot hold on to things and enter. We must put down what we carry, open the door, and then take up only what we need to bring inside.

when the chef starts thinking he's an artist rather than a craftsman.

Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog? Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?

I had no idea you had musical tastes, Nick. Why did you keep them from me all these years? Because I never asked, I suppose. One always finds the answer to everything in one's own egotism.

One always finds the answer to everything in one's own egotism.