Quotes About Ego

Suddenly all those individuals who yesterday felt that "we" meant only their families, their professions, or perhaps their communities, become men of the nation. Their emotions and thoughts, their egos, that "something" within them, all are transformed: they have become historical.

The birth of the Ego, and of the world-anxiety with which it is identical, is one of the final secrets of humanity and of mobile life generally. In front of the Microcosm there stands up a Macrocosm wide and overpowering, an abyss of alien, dazzling existence and activity that frightens the small lonely ego back into itself...Over the dawn of the new Culture likewise lay this deathly anxiety.

Narcissistic deterioration

There are men who are willing to marry a woman they do not care about merely because she is admired by other men. Such a relation exists between many men and their thoughts.

When the healthy pursuit of self-interest and self-realization turns into self-absorption, other people can lose their intrinsic value in our eyes and become mere means to the fulfillment of our needs and desires.

we can learn to love. How do we do that? …First things first. First we discipline our ego to look beyond the narrow confines of its immediate needs; then we will have a change to understand what real love is. First manners, then love (pp.19-20).

Dr. Franklin says "it is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.

it is the eyes of others and not our own eyes which ruin us. If all the world were blind except myself I should not care for fine clothes or furniture.

The root of faults is nothing other than your ego-clinging, the attitude of deluded fixation, so cut the ties of ego-clinging! Cast away the fixation on enemy and friend! Forsake worldly concerns! Abandon materialistic pursuits! Engage in nothing but the Dharma from the core of your heart! Just as a seedling doesn't grow on a stone, there will be no enhancement without removing the fault of ego-clinging. You should therefore abandon the root of all evils, ego-clinging. (p. 90)

How do you like that, Corbray? You're upstaging yourself.

I've spent my entire adult life working and climbing side-by-side with men, so trust me when I say that most male stupidity is a result of one of two things. It's either their egos, or it's that junk in their pants.

In looking back over the years I wouldn't go so far as to say I have never been brave, but most of the things for which I had been given credit for bravery were nothing but daredevil stunts. I was trying to build up my own ego, trying to imitate the bravery of people I had read about or had been told about in the years gone by.

Some people change when they think they're a star or something.

Behind this understanding of vocation is a truth that the ego does not want to hear because it threatens the ego's turf: everyone has a life that is different from the "I" of daily consciousness, a life that is trying to live through the "I" who is its vessel. This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches: there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self.

What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity—the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.

Self-denigration is all too clearly a form of indirect self-glorification.

Uno se enfrenta a la peor prueba que existe: uno mismo. He conocido a muchos bravucones que se desinflaban llegado el momento.

The greatest idol I will never truly remove is self.

If you want to stay here, that's something different. But thinking that you are the only one who can possibly keep her company - that's a trap." (p. 320)

Yes," Elizaveta said venomously. "We are all beautiful here. Can we get going? Or do I need to get the makeup mirror out of my purse so you two can admire yourselves a little longer?

I had to ask. "Do you really think everything I write down is about you?" Thomas said, "Well, this next bit had better be. I insist." It is very bad for Thomas's character when he gets his own way all the time. That's why I'm going to omit the next bit. If he has forgotten it in fifty years or so, too bad for him. I won't have.

First and foremost, we need to acknowledge we are not our ego-based interpretation of ourselves but the Spirit beyond it, and so much more powerful than we even know.

I love narcissists-even more than they love themselves. You don't have to buoy them up. They are their own razzle-dazzle show and you are the blessed, favored with a front-row seat.

The ego breaks free of the soul, its matrix, in order to reflect soul, to make its potential actual, and eventually to be reunited with the realized soul to form the totality of the self.