Quotes About Ego

The great corrupter of public men is the ego - corrupter because distracter. Wealth, sensuality, power cannot hold a candle to it. Looking in the mirror distracts one's attention from the problem.

When one lives attached to money, pride or power, it is impossible to be truly happy.

Freedom means the power to act by soul guidance, not by the compulsions of desires and habits. Obeying the ego leads to bondage; obeying the soul brings liberation.

The human mind is prone to pride even when not supported by power; how much more, then, does it exalt itself when it has that support?

Man, if he compare himself with all that he can see, is at the zenith of power; but if he compare himself with all that he can conceive, he is at the nadir of weakness.

I like to hear a man talk about himself because then I never hear anything, but good.

No man is great if he thinks he is.

Everyone who's psychologically normal thinks they're the hero.

Self-deprecating humor has become my standard response to insults. When someone criticizes me, I reply that matters are even worse than he is suggesting. If, for example, someone suggests that I am lazy, I reply that it is a miracle that I get any work done at all. If someone accuses me of having a big ego, I reply that on most days it is noon before I become aware that anyone else inhabits the planet.

Out of any conflict, the losers create more myths than the winners. It is hardly a surprise. After all, winners have little to explain to themselves. They won. For the loser, however, coping with defeat, dealing with it personally and explaining it to others, places enormous strains on the ego, self-respect, and sense of self-worth of the defeated.

Alas, the penis is such a ridiculous petitioner. It is so unreliable, though everything depends on it—the world is balanced on it like a ball on a seal's nose. It is so easily teased, insulted, betrayed, abandoned; yet it must pretend to be invulnerable, a weapon which confers magical powers upon its possessor; consequently this muscleless inchworm must try to swagger through temples and pull apart thighs like the hairiest Samson, the mightiest ram.

He thinks he's all aces but he's mostly sevens and eights.

Pride always wants a little smarting.

No man must think that the world was made for him.

Just because you're beautiful and perfect, it's made you conceited.

Just because you're beautiful and perfect, it's made you conceited.

We need do no more to lose our souls than to seek ourselves.

are incurably conceited and pathologically unsure of themselves; they respond to stroking the way a cat does.

No truly great person ever thought themselves so.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

No really great man ever thought himself so.

We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we cant tolerate.

Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.

We are all sealed up alone. We all carry the center of the universe inside our own heads. It is, for each of us, a point a few inches behind our eyes where the binocular lines of vision converge. Only a narcissist or a child is fool enough to believe it.