Quotes About Ego

Feeling superior and beyond it is a sure sign that the irrational is at work.

There may be no more Sun Kings but there are still plenty of people who believe the sun revolves around them.

The bigger it bloats, the harder it falls.

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please and impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite—inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.

For, as Cicero says, even those who argue against fame still want the books they write against it to bear their name in the title and hope to become famous for despising it. Everything else is subject to barter: we will let our friends have our goods and our lives if need be; but a case of sharing our fame and making someone else the gift of our reputation is hardly to be found. Montaigne, 1533-1592

Moralizers who try to separate themselves and denounce the narcissists in the world today are often the biggest narcissists of them all - they love the sound of their voice as they point fingers and preach.

He increasingly spoke of himself in the third person, as if he had become an impersonal revolutionary force, and as such he was infallible. If he happened to mispronounce a word in a speech, every subsequent speaker from then on would have to pronounce it that way. "If I'd said it right," confessed one of his top lieutenants, "Stalin would have felt I was correcting him." And that could prove suicidal.

You like to imagine yourself in control of your fate, consciously planning the course of your life as best you can. But you are largely unaware of how deeply your emotions dominate you. They make you veer toward ideas that soothe your ego.

They forget the favors they have received and imagine they have earned their success by their own merits.

su  narcisismo re- sulta endemoniadamente  atractivo.

Las mujeres [narcisistas] son las que más fascinan a los hombres.

Ideas as things to play with; if you hold onto them for too long, they become something dead...connecting to the world is more important than holding onto your ego

The weakness stems from our natural tendency to overestimate our skills. We normally have a self-opinion that is somewhat elevated in relation to reality.

Trying to deny our self-absorbed nature, trying to pretend we are somehow more altruistic than others, make it impossible for us to transform ourselves.

In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture. All of us have foolish sides, moments in which we lose our heads and think more of our ego or short-term goals. It is human nature. Seeing this foolishness within you, you can then accept it in others. This will allow you to smile at their antics, to tolerate their presence as you would a silly child, and to avoid the madness of trying to change them.

But this means that he will be disliked on account of his superiority; and if a man is to be liked, he must really be inferior in point of intellect. ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 1788–1860

Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible. They are more than ready to find their most cherished opinions contradicted by reality.

It is a deadly but common misperception to believe that by displaying and vaunting your gifts and talents, you are winning the master's affection.

According to Klein, these common strategies are brittle and will break down under stress—a downturn in their career, bouts of depression, wounds to their ego. The envy they experienced in their earliest years remains continually latent and ready to be directed at others. They are literally looking for people to envy so they can reexperience the primal emotion.

The Laws of Human Nature, 10: Beware the Fragile Ego—The Law of Envy

The better you feel about yourself, the less you feel the need to show off.

I fear there is in all men who achieve their life's ambition only a narrow line between dignity and vanity, confidence and delusion, glory and self-destruction

there is in all men who achieve their life's ambition only a narrow line between dignity and vanity, confidence and delusion, glory and self-destruction.

The Light save me from men who think with the hair on their chests.