Quotes About Ego

Hollywood actors and actress are not better than you -- They just act like they are.

Fame clearly breeds a false sense of security.

Arrogance was unattractive enough when it was attached to true talent or brilliance. Attached to childishness, it was just plain irritating.

The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.

Centroversion persistently strives to ensure that the ego shall not remain an organ of the unconscious, but shall become more and more the representative of wholeness. That is to say, the ego fights against the unconscious tendency that seeks to master it, and instead of allowing itself to be possessed, learns to keep its independence in relation to both inside and outside.

In these circumstances, when consciousness is insufficiently differentiated from the unconscious, and the ego from the group, the group member finds himself as much at the mercy of group reactions as of unconscious constellations.

The more unconscious the whole of a man's personality is and the more germinal his ego, the more his experience of the whole will be projected upon the group.

Consciousness = deliverance: that is the watchword inscribed above all man's efforts to deliver himself from the embrace of the primordial uroboric dragon. Once the ego sets itself up as center and establishes itself in its own right as ego consciousness, the original situation is forcibly broken down.

To fly too high and fall, to go too deep and get stuck, these are alike symptoms of an overvaluation of the ego that ends in disaster, death, or madness.

The fusion of areas of consciousness which for us are more or less clearly defined leads, as it were, to a perpetual game of hide-and-seek with ourselves and to a confusion of ego positions. Emotional instability, ambivalent pleasure-pain reactions, the interchangeability of inside and outside, of individual and group—all these result in an insecurity for the ego which is intensified by the powerfully emotional and affective "vectors" of the unconscious.

Consciousness has to resist these instinctive reactions because the ego is liable to be overpowered by the blind force of instinct, against which the conscious system must protect itself if development is to proceed.

Thus, as the ego develops, it is imperative to prevent a situation from arising in which the dynamic-emotional component of an unconscious image or archetype would drive the ego into an instinctive reaction and so overwhelm consciousness.

If the ego is to attain a condition of tranquillity in which to exercise discrimination, consciousness and the differentiated function must be as far removed as possible from the active field of emotional components. All differentiated functions are liable to be disturbed by them, but the disturbance is most evident in the case of thinking, which is by nature opposed to feeling and even more to emotionality.

Individualization, ego formation, and heroism belong to the very life of the male group and are in fact its expressions.

Ego consciousness is a sense organ which perceives the world and the unconscious by means of images, but this image-forming capacity is itself a psychic product, not a quality of the world. Image formation alone makes perception and assimilation possible.

Ego-accentuation leads from the uroboric to the hermaphroditic, and so to the narcissistic stage, which is autoerotic at first and represents a primitive form of centroversion. The next stage is that of phallic-chthonic masculinity, dominated by the body sphere, and this in turn is succeeded by a masculinity in which the activity of consciousness has become the specific activity of an autonomous ego.

is nevertheless a conflict between the developing ego consciousness and the world of instinct. The former must always put its own specific mode of behavior, which pursues very different aims, in place of collective and instinctive reaction, for the latter is by no means always in accord with the individual aims of the ego, nor with its preservation.

Only then, as a result of his light-creating and space-creating intervention, was there heaven above and earth below, back and front, left and right-in other words, only then was space organized with reference to an ego.

Ego formation can only proceed by way of distinction from the nonego and consciousness only emerge where it detaches itself from what is unconscious; and the individual only arrives at individuation when he marks himself off from the anonymous collective.

From the union of the hero's ego consciousness with the creative side of the soul, when he "knows" and realizes both the world and the anima, there is begotten the true birth, the synthesis of both.

IN THE COURSE of Western development, the essentially positive process of emancipating the ego and consciousness from the tyranny of the unconscious has become negative.

Containment in the uroboros and its supremacy over the ego mean, on the bodily level, that ego and consciousness are at the outset continually at the mercy of the instincts, impulses, sensations, and reactions deriving from the world of the body.

The center common to conscious action through the will and to conscious knowledge through cognition is, however, the ego.

Ego consciousness has, as the last-born, to fight for its position and secure it against the assaults of the Great Mother within and the World Mother without. Finally it has to extend its own territory in a long and bitter struggle.