Quotes About Selfness

Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.

The friend is not another I, but an otherness immanent in selfness, a becoming other of the self. At the point at which I perceive my existence as pleasant, my perception is traversed by a concurrent perception that dislocates it and deports it towards the friend, towards the other self. Friendship is this desubjectivization at the very heart of the most intimate perception of self.

humans wrestled endlessly with their own overpowering egos. Some tried suppressing selfness, seeking detachment. Others subsumed personal ambition in favor of a greater whole—family, religion, or a leader. Later they passed through a phase in which individualism was extolled as the highest virtue, teaching their young to inflate the ego beyond all natural limits or restraint.