c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I suppose it is possible to be all of these things. To sort of fall out of who you are into another, as well as to journey back to some essential sense of self. We only see what we see.He was whatever he needed to be, what we asked him to be. Perhaps there are lives like that—they pour into whatever space we have made ready for them to fill. 
— Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
In the night, I am kept awake by the endless chatter of my inner self. I hear it speak softly of old hurts and fondly of past loves, while its demands and anxieties resound throughout me in multitudes.I could be calm and composed all day long, but the moment it is dark, my mind riots.
— Beau Taplin
But suppose your dæmon settles in a shape you don't like?Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up.
— Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in the regard to all the for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority–like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner–it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time and practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.
— Albert Camus, The Fall
Life can be awkward at times. It is part of the growing process.
— Jim Fargiano, The Spoken Words of Spirit: Lessons from the Other Side
If everybody spent enough time worrying about their own goddamn selves, no one would have to worry about anyone else.
— Don De Grazia, American Skin
[M]y discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.
— Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism
When I loved myself enough, I would sometimes wake in the night to music playing within me.
— Kim McMillen, When I Loved Myself Enough
We are, at least in part, who we remember ourselves to be. Take away our memories, and you take away our selves.
— Beth Revis, The Body Electric
As long as you were comfortable with yourself and believed in yourself, then you could just throw out all that nonsense of worrying about your status and "success" and other people's opinions.
— James Collins, Beginner's Greek
The only thing you really have to prove is yourself.
— Tadahiko Nagao
Inevitably, though, there will always be a significant part of the past which can neither be burnt nor banished to the soothing limbo of forgetfulness— myself. I was and still am that same ship which carried me to the new shore, the same vessel containing all the memories and dreams of the child in the brick house with the toy tea set. I am the shore I left behind as well as the home I return to every evening. The voyage cannot proceed without me.
— Luisa A. Igloria
He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses.
— James Joyce, Dubliners
He liked to get off by himself, a mile or so from camp, and listen to the country, not the men.
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Most of us have nicknames—annoying, endearing, embarrassing.But what about your true
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, / And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten / million years, / I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control.
— Oprah Winfrey
Why is erasing desire seen as so important? If the subjugation of the self is the point of the self what's the point in having a self? It's like someone handing you a leaflet which says throw this leaflet away.
— Tibor Fischer, Voyage to the End of the Room
It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
What will you do with your self? Many men and women are still in darkness, trying to figure out the meaning and purpose of life. But no matter what you try to do with your self— whether you deny it, obliterate it, annihilate it, accept it or express it—believe me, it is still alive and kicking.
— K.P. Yohannan, Living in the Light of Eternity
Without Psychological Evolution there cannot be any form of revolution. The self is constantly changing. Be involved, be evolved, be revolutionized as lucent and fresh as the new wave hitting at the shore. Become the Sea of Changes. It starts from within.
— Grigoris Deoudis
None of us just pop into the world fully formed, so it's the little facts that make us.
— Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows
[…] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one’s embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one’s home.
— Anita Brookner, Latecomers
I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don’t need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.
— Lev Grossman
There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as myself, sure enough, but one who knows more than I do, thinks less of danger and propriety than I ever have or will, feels a cool and amused contempt for the rules and rituals by which I live, the duties I too readily accept, the compromises I too willingly allow (p. 262)
— John Burnside, A Lie About My Father: A Memoir
I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.
— Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a soul above buttons.
— George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
But I will confess  that I began as an astronomer—a liking for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things, a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit— and that my longing for you has not taken me very far from that original desire to inscribe a comet’s orbit around the walls of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.
— Troy Jollimore
Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)
— Samuel Beckett, Embers
As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self chooses the Thou.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning
This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing.
— Sue Miller, While I Was Gone
Most of the tools from medieval times were extensions of the physical self. Tools are now extensions of the mental self.
— Lotoya Peterson
Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.
— Fernando Pessoa
For a moment the radio wavered between stationsand I was so busymaking myself marvelous.
— S. Jane Sloat, In the Voice of a Minor Saint
We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.
— Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism
It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.
— René Dubos, Louis Pasteur: Free Lance of Science
Humans have invented all kinds of symbols to communicate not only with other humans but more importantly with ourselves.
— José Luis Ruiz, The Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery
We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...
— Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men
Why were there no words that spoke positively about being concerned about the self? Why was there only negative connotation in terms like "selfish", "self-interested", "self-centred", "self-obsessed" and so on? Why was it so much better to be without a self: "selfless", "self-sacrificing", "self-effacing", etc?
— A.J. Dalton, Necromancer's Gambit
[T]he Enneagram is, at its most abstract, a universal mandala of the self—a symbol of each of us.
— Don Richard Riso
Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.
— Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
You only exist because of the agreements you made with yourself and with the other humans around you.
— José Luis Ruiz
Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.
— E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime
... telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.
— Catherine Lacey, The Answers
You can't betray yourself too often, or you become somebody else.
— Ed Harris
She filled herself entirely with the molten dark.
— Gertrud Kolmar
Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
...the other's self, that enormous hulking thing each possessed, that a self of course is not inconsequential. p124
— Jane Hamilton, The Excellent Lombards
Look for love in the most likely places, the places you love to visit and like to stay on for some more time. Just be your natural self- the real you- and believe me love will come waltzing in to the tune of your favourite song.
— Latika Teotia
The one who loves you has the right to tick you off, to correct you when you go wrong and admonish you when you repeat.
— Latika Teotia
Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?
— Ali Smith, Autumn
If you are free to be yourself, You would love to be yourself.
— Mahrukh
Make an attempt to know yourself out of your comfort zone, you will see how how amazing you are.
— Mahrukh
You do it best, when you put your true color in it.
— Mahrukh
Love yourself for who you are, you worth it.
— Mahrukh
Elliott was disarmingly bright, according to everyone who knew him, an avid reader of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Stendhal, Freud, the Buddha, all of whom destabilized notions of identity. I think he knew how little we know about who we are. The idea comes through in lyrics. “I don’t know who I am,” he says simply; at times he wishes he were no one. He’s a stickman shooting blanks at emptiness, living with “one dimension dead.” He’s an invisible man with a see-through mind. He’s a junkyard full of false starts. He’s a ghost-writer, feeling hollow.
— William Todd Schultz, Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith
The Illusory SelfI am composed of body and soul, I seem to have mind, reason, sense, yet I find none of them my own. For where was my body prior to my birth, and whither will it go when I have departed? Where are the various states produced by the life stages of an illusory self? Where is the newborn babe, the child, the boy, the pubescent, the stripling, the bearded youth, the lad, the full-grown man? Whence came the soul, whither will it go, how long will it be our mate? Can we tell its essential nature? When did we acquire it? Prior to our birth? But we were not then in existence. What of it after death? But then we who are embodied, compounds endowed with quality, shall be no more, but shall hasten to our rebirth, to be with the unbodied, without composition and without quality. But now, inasmuch as we are alive, we are the dominated rather than the rulers, known rather than knowing. The soul knows us, though unknown by us, and imposes commands we are obliged to obey as wervants their mistress. And when it will, it will transact its divorce in court and depart, leaving our home desolate of life. If we press it to remain, it will dissolve our relationship. So subtle is its nature that it furnishes no handle to the body.
— Philo of Alexandria
One of the things about Ike that makes him so indisputably a hero is that he doesn't leave his own contradictions to the effete disputations of armchair scholars. He grapples with them himself, in his own lifetime.
— Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
The self can watch itself becoming lazy, or non-watchful; this is an asset that can make both for humor and profound well-being.
— Eli Siegel, Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims
Being cool is being your own self, not doing something that someone else is telling you to do. Just be bold, be brave enough to be your true self. In short, be yourself, but always your better self.
— Usman Aman
For the broken hearts,I promise it gets better.I promise that the minutes and hours will go by faster and that the ache in your chest will stop.I promise that the day you can forgive and realize that you don't have to feel this way will come.I promise you that right now, no matter what age you are, it will hurt. But pain is temporary.I promise that months or even years from now you'll look back and realize how silly you're acting. Although it doesn't feel silly.I promise that your relationship with them may or may not bloom into at least a friendship.I promise it'll stop hurting. Give it time, give yourself time to be an individual again. Find the confidence to do things on your own. Reconnect with the friends you pushed away. Form a better self. Be selfish. Stop thinking about their opinion.xoxoxo, M
— Emily Trunko, Dear My
My dear friends, from the devil's standpoint there is not the slightest difference between being puffed up with pride in yourself or spending the whole of your time condemning yourself. Either way the devil is very well-pleased. Any concentration upon self in any shape or form is of the devil.
— Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Seek thy sacred self.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.
— Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained
She was tired of everyone deciding her life for her. She was ready to figure out who she really was--not what anyone else told her to be.
— Marissa Meyer, Scarlet
There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I am such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
What it is,” she sighed, “to have to choose between self and security.
— Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
There is a widespread philosophical tendency towards the view which tells us that Man is the measure of all things, that truth is man-made, that space and time and the world of universals are properties of the mind, and that, if there be anything not created by the mind, it is unknowable and of no account for us. This view, if our previous discussions were correct, is untrue; but in addition to being untrue, it has the effect of robbing philosophic contemplation of all that gives it value, since it fetters contemplation to Self. What it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between us and the world beyond. The man who finds pleasure in such a theory of knowledge is like a man who never leaves the domestic circle for fear his word might not be law.
— Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
Why should I take my clothes off (...) when there are, already, so many other woman doing it for me?
— Efrat Cybulkiewicz
We all get to discover who we really are at some point, and when we do, it can be quite unsettling.
— Ted Dekker, Identity
These ideas fit the experience of these Japanese women who often talked about searching for or trying to develop "self" (jibun). Cultivating or polishing self by doing tea ceremony or being a good mother, for example, had a good connotation for the Japanese because it meant that you were trying to go beyond your narrow self and connect self with the larger world beyond social norms. But developing self in the new way these women used it meant to develop self according to just what you want to do or in a way that enhances your own possibilities in the world. Would others see choosing a life for self as selfish? These women had to maintain some ambiguity because they were wandering into dangerous territory when they wanted to travel just to enjoy themselves, or keep working and not marry. In a society that honored the cultivation of a larger self, would they themselves someday suffer for having chosen the self-centered way?
— Nancy Ross Rosenberger, Dilemmas of Adulthood: Japanese Women and the Nuances of Long-Term Resistance
The thing that I’m most likely to collapse under is not the weight of the stresses that stand around me, but the ego that sits within me.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Sometimes one must become something one fears or loathes in order for the greater self to survive.
— Alex  Lamb, Roboteer
We lavish more attention onto our past, after its done, than in the making of it. as a result; "What is done" and "Could have been" becomes ruthless killers lurking in the darkness of our consciousness.
— Efrat Cybulkiewicz
Time alone can help us to look inward, to fish for things that others can’t see.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6
There is a phase of melancholy—a phase that has sloughed all urgency—that seems to me always a revelation of that ancient, familiar thing, my true self. If there is anything in a person with which one may be in love, surely it can only ever be the self that such melancholy reveals. There are potent and austere traditions that teach us a true self that has no qualities, no atmosphere, and which thus could never be revealed by melancholia; some of these traditions maintain, in a tone that suggests resistance is folly, that there is no self at all. But such traditions are not native to my soul, and within my life they are new, though they are older than me in history. For me, the self revealed by melancholy is older and thus truer.
— Quentin S. Crisp, The Little One: A Meditation
Khuda tujhe kisi toofaan se aashna karde,Ke tere behr ki maujon men iztiraab naheenMay God grant you a storm! The voyage of your life is on too placid an ocean…
— Muhammad Iqbal, Zarb-e-Kaleem: Armagan-e-Hijaz
Khird-Mandon Se Kya Puchon Ke Meri Ibtida Kya HaiKe Main Iss Fikar Mein Rehta Hun, Meri Intiha Kya HaiWhat should I ask the sages about my origin:I am always wanting to know my goal.
— Muhammad Iqbal, Sir
Experience has taught me that there are some situations in which it's better to keep quiet. That is, I tried to keep quiet. Life gives me good advice, but sometimes I refuse to take it.
— Etgar Keret, The Seven Good Years
I love widely and deeply, the Naive sense of Primitivism I manage to project in my Art. It always gives me a sense that it is not developed or derived from anything else, and it is unaffected by objective reasoning. Very similar to my nomadic life.
— Efrat Cybulkiewicz
It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
Me, when it comes to religion, I have no God. When I'm cool, I don't need anyone, and when I'm feeling shitty and this big empty hole opens up inside me, I just know there's never been a god that could fill it and there never will be.
— Etgar Keret, The Seven Good Years
Now, four years out of high school, I'm in an environment where people appreciate personality over appearance, and that makes me happy.
— Connor Franta, A Work in Progress
Religion is the Self revealing secrets of the Self to the Self.
— Abhijit Naskar, Illusion of Religion: A Treatise on Religious Fundamentalism
Your first thought is what you've been conditioned to think
—  what you think next defines who you are.
Life is beyond self.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Be confident enough to show your true self to the world.
— Fennel Hudson, Fine Things - Fennel's Journal - No. 8
A person has to be comfortable in his or her own skin.
— Fennel Hudson, Fine Things - Fennel's Journal - No. 8
There’s no point pretending to be someone or something we’re not.
— Fennel Hudson, Fine Things - Fennel's Journal - No. 8
We should be authentic: the ‘real deal’. Neither a clone nor mimic be.
— Fennel Hudson, Fine Things - Fennel's Journal - No. 8
​Till mirrors were Invented, Face was not You, Not Even part of Your Performance.
— Vineet Raj Kapoor
I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?
— Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
I'm not even who I am, yet.
— Anonymous
I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I’ve been saved from myself.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
If it’s about me, I can be assured that there will be a bunch of empty chairs in the auditorium of my life; save the one I’m sitting in.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
If I can’t quite figure out what an ego is, all I have to do is look for the thing that’s killing itself in the very act of feeding itself.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn't it? You doubt your value. Don't run from who you are.
— Napz Cherub Pellazo
I don’t like being left for long struggling with my dangerous self.
— Hanif Kureishi, The Nothing
If it has anything to do with me, it has nothing to do with sacrifice.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried, and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self.
— Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong
Surviving isn't just about cutting out your heart and burning every feeling into ash. Sometimes it means taking whatever is thrown at you, beautiful or grotesque, poisonous or blissful, and carving out your life with the pieces you're given.
— Roshani Chokshi, A Crown of Wishes
Hypocrisy—in other words, the practice of lying about lying—shields us from seeing ourselves as we are: a collocation of fragments that fit together as a biological unit but not as anything else, not as that ghost which has been called a self, a phantasm whose ecotoplasmic unreality we can never see through. By staying true to the lie of the self, the ego, we can hold onto the illusion that we will be who we are all our lives and not see our selves die a thousand times before our death. While some have dedicated themselves to getting to the bottom of how these parts create the illusion of a whole, this is not how pyramids are built. To get a pyramid off the ground takes a lot of ego—the base material of those stacks of stones that tourists visit while on vacation. Of course, a pyramid is actually a polyhedron, that is, a mathematical conception which pyramids in the physical world resemble . . . at least from a distance. The nearer one gets to a pyramid, the more it reveals itself to be what it is: a roughly pyramidal conglomeration of bricks, a composition of fragments that is not what it seems to be. This is also how it works with humans. The world around us encourages the build up of our egos—those pyramids of self-esteem—as if we needed such encouragement. Although everyone is affected by this pyramid scheme, some participate in it more than others: they are observably more full of themselves and tend to their egos as they would exotic plants in a hothouse. It helps if they can wear down the self-esteem of others, or simply witness this erosion. As the American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal said famously and often: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” None of this could work without the distance we put between what we are and what we think we are. Then we may appear to exist apart from our constituent elements. Self-esteem would evaporate without a self to esteem. As with pyramids, it is only at a distance that this illusion can be pulled off. Hypocrisy is that distance.
— Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
If I’m my biggest fan, the only person in the stadium is probably me.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
In a world of selfie-addiction smile usually is the brand name for an essential drug called pretense
— Munia Khan
Isn't it strange that what we call "self" doesn't really constitute of our "own". It consists of parts and bits of so many people around us! People who helped us, people who laughed with us, people who wiped our tears, people who walked with us, people whom we looked up to as idols, people who silently followed us, people who hated us, people who challenged us! We are a net integral of all these, isn't it?
— Neelam Saxena Chandra
If there's no sense of self, there's no sense of culture. If there's no sense of wisdom, there's no sense of progress. If there's no sense of love, there's no sense of peace. If there's no sense of peace, there's no sense of stability. If there's no room for freedom of expressions, there's no room for growth.
— Henry Johnson Jr
How frustrating to think you can be lost to yourself. And yet how often it is that a stranger stares back at you from the mirror. Maybe in truth we never see ourselves as clearly as the thousands of eyes that daily take us in.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
When you are filled with self-hate your mind is reversed. Meaning you will love the things that destroy you, and you will hate the things that advance your growth.
— Amos N. Wilson
The greatest form of betrayal is self-betrayal."-Dr Renu S Persaud
— Renu Persaud PhD
Ego is borne of the need to ‘prove’ oneself instead of making the choice to ‘be’ oneself. And so maybe we need to begin curbing the birthrate.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Whatever the item is that I have chosen to give you, it is nothing more than the receptacle within which I have placed the whole of myself. If it is empty, it is not a gift.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
He thought about how the camera makes one fall in love with an image of oneself, and perpetuates a false reality.
— Ben Okri, The Age of Magic
Like the turtle's shell, the sense of self serves as a shield against stimulation and as a burden which limits mobility into possibly dangerous areas. The turtle rarely has to think about what's on the other side of his shell; whatever it is, it can't hurt him, can't even touch him. So, too, adults insist on the shell of a consistent self for themselves and their children and appreciate turtles for friends; they wish to be protected from being hurt or touched or confused or having to think. If a man can rely on consistency, he can afford not to notice people after the first few times. But I imagined a world in which each individual might be about to play the lover, the benefactor, the sponger, the attacker, the friend: and once known as one of the next day he might yet be anything. Would we pay attention to this person? Would life be boring? Would life be livable? I saw then clearly for the first time that the fear of failure keeps us huddled in the cave of self - a group of behavior patterns we have mastered and have no intention of risking failure by abandoning.
— Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man
In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.
— Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Preachers love only their own voices.
— John Berger, Confabulations
Self-serving mentality hinders from fulfilling kingdom mandate
— Sunday Adelaja
Give yourself a break. When you are alone with your thoughts you should not be arguing.
— Gary Rudz
After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident to one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
I mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no 'I,' and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It's more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Time was not a line, but an awareness. I was no longer a body, but a series of pieces whistling as they bonded. I felt every cell within me. I could count them, name them, kill them, and resurrect them. Within the core, I was a tower made of fossil fragments. I could be disassembled and reassembled. If only someone knew the correct pressure point, I would turn into a pile of elements running off to find another bond, like seasonal farmhands journeying from East to West.
— Jaroslav Kalfar, Spaceman of Bohemia
Writing is an exemplary means to make contact with the whole of the self. What ultimately makes up the self is a collation of personal knowledge derived from physical, mental, and emotional experiences. The only way to divine the self is to understand what comprises its constituent components. The self is what we do, think, and act. Writing is not merely a documenter of the actions of the self. Writing, similar to other artistic activities, is one of the fundamental activities that a self can perform.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Self-questioning – an effort to get in touch with our essential self – is an endless stream of thought.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The death of our self-worth begins at its appraisal, for such an action erroneously implies that our worth can be quantified.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
One of the ability of humility is the ability to take the second place without striving for self-promotion
— Sunday Adelaja
We discover part of our true self only by conspicuous inspection of the depths of our conscience.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Empathy is a quality today that we need more than ever. Throughout his life Jesus showed empathy and care for others on a level never seen before. From him we learn that Gods ways of service to others before obsession with self is the path he wants us to walk on and deep down we know it.
— Tim Crawshaw, So, You Want to Be Rich... But Jesus Doesn't
The majority of men could sooner be brought to believe themselves a piece of lava in the moon than to take themselves for a self.
— J.G. Fichte
It's amazing how close you are to your essential self as a kid, he thought, and how far from it you drift the more you strive to be loved.
— Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop
So what do I do? What do we do? How do we move forward when we are tired and afraid? What do we do when the voice in our head is yelling that WE ARE NEVER GONNA MAKE IT? How do we drag ourselves through the muck when our brain is telling us youaredumbandyouwillneverfinishandnoonecaresanditistimeyoustop? Well, the first thing we do is take our brain out and put it in a drawer. Stick it somewhere and let it tantrum until it wears itself out. You may still hear the brain and all the shitty things it is saying to you, but it will be muffled, and just the fact that it is not in your head anymore will make things seem clearer. And then you just do it. You just dig in and write it. You use your body. you lean over the computer and stretch and pace. You write and then cook something and write some more. you put your hand on your heart and feel it beating and decide if what you wrote feels true. You do it because the doing of it is the thing. The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing. That is what I know. Writing the book is about writing the book. So here we go, you and me. Because what else are we going to do? Say no? Say no to an opportunity that may be slightly out of our comfort zone? Quiet our voice because we are worried it is not perfect? I believe great people do things before they are ready. This is America and I am allowed to have healthy self-esteem. This book comes straight from my feisty and freckled fingers. Know it was a battle. Blood was shed. A war raged between my jokey and protective brain and my squishy and tender heart. I have realized that mystery is what keeps people away, and I've grown tired of smoke and mirrors. I yearn for the clean, well-lighted place. So let's peek behind the curtain and hail the others like us. The open-faced sandwiches who take risks and live big and smile with all of their teeth. These are the people I want to be around. This is the honest way I want to live and love and write.
— Amy Poehler, Yes Please
The moment you are more interested and obsessed to others you begin to loose your Self . It's so insane that you again seek others to help find self.
— Gopichand Lagadapati
To Live In The Original Intention Of God Is To Chase Self Destruction Away
— Sunday Adelaja
The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.
— James Baldwin
This’ path is not to be followed through force. It is to be followed through understanding.
— Dada Bhagwan
Going all in and all out for the All in All is both a death sentence and a life sentence. Your sinful nature, along with its selfish desires, is nailed to the cross. Then, and only then, does your true personality, your true potential, and your true purpose come alive. After all, God cannot resurrect what has not died. And that's why so many people are half alive. They haven't died to self yet.
— Mark Batterson, All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life
Why not start figuring out ways to change the way we treat each other? The way we talk to each other, the way we talk about each other. To love each other. You know it starts off with self-love. We have to love ourselves before we can love anybody else.And the media from day one, from when you were little ass kids, they teach you not to love yourself. They take something out of you and they try to sell it back to you... Something that you’ve been fighting for your entire life that’s taken from you as a child. That you always had inside of you. That’s self-love.That's why I love you so much, cause as everybody knows, I love me so much.The greatest gift you have is your now…you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow and the past is the past.
— Kanye West
Of course love is blind
—  it keeps me blind to myself.
Most important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.
— Daniel Kahneman
Is it possible to cause so much misery to another human being, simply by being oneself? she wondered, feeling a reflection of that misery. No help for it; she must continue to be herself.
— Amy Witting, Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop
Observe things as they are and don't pay attention to other people. There are some people just like mad dogs barking at everything that moves, even barking when the wind stirs among the grass and leaves.
— Huang Po, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind
Some humans are so consumed with trying to control the outcomes of their own lives that they don’t have any idea the part they play in the outcome of someone else’s.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
I lived willy-nilly. Without any sense of being part of the order of things. I lived by fragments, pieces, scraps, in the moment, at random, from incident to incident, as if buffeted by ebb and flow. Oftentimes I had the impression that someone had torn the majority of pages out of the book of my life, because they were empty, or because they belonged not to me but to someone else’s life.
— Wiesław Myśliwski, Ostatnie rozdanie
An insipid voice message or an incongruent emergence from the “other” world may disrupt our whole thinking system. If we are not able to deal with the fragmentation of our self and assess the deconstruction of our identity, a corny incident could easily capsize our being. A misinterpretation of facts and expectations may perturb our awareness and unsettle our perception. When “I” and “me” don’t get along very well, the road to oneness may be very often bumpy. (“Alors, tout a basculé”)
— Erik Pevernagie
Refuse the old means of measurement.Rely instead on the thrumming wilderness of self. Listen.-From "Out West
— Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems
You grow. You are large. You are a 19th century poem.All of America is inside you,a catalogue of lives and landand burrowing things.-From "Catalogue
— Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems
We build a self-image from stored memories including a swarm of physical and social interactions, evocative emotions, and other associative experiences. Selfhood also comes from the language, symbols, and artifacts, which potent combinations create cultural beliefs. We build a self upon real as well as imaginary experiences. A person’s rational and irrational beliefs forge a sense of self. The books that we read, the music we listen to, the films we watch, and what church or other social gatherings we attend constitute meaningful activities that congeal and work together to shape our sense of identity. Cultural determinants drive how we work, play, worship, and raise our children. Culture has its own sources of reinforcement that can influence members of society to adopt an interdependent, communal sense of self, or an independent, individualistic sense of self. Culture is not fate, but none of us is immune from the great octopus of culture; its tentacles touch us every direction that we turn. Our self-identity is subtlety influenced by the prevailing political-social culture as well as affected by our perceived social status, economic or otherwise.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Don’t be defined by someone else’s definition of you.
— Toni Sorenson, The Great Brain Cleanse
The only sin in this world is to lose faith in yourself.
— Abhijit Naskar
Don't build yourself an ivory tower" the moralists say. But I am an ivory tower by the mere fact that I am. On the crude physical level the body is a frame of (ivory) bones on which the muscles are stretched, crowned by an (ivory) bone pill-box turret housing the brain — shielding it from the blows of 'reality' so that it can get on with its absurd work undisturbed. On the non-physical level my I-ness is an ivory tower of orderly individual views and vistas shielding 'me' from being swallowed up in chaos. Dear moralists: don't they see that life is a constant flight up and down the endless steps of the dark ivory tower seeking to escape from the horrid chaos of real freedom?
— Nanamoli Thera
I'm tired and angry at me. For letting myself get smaller and smaller in the hopes that he would notice me more. But how can someone notice you if you keep getting smaller?
— Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces
Elza needed challenges in her life, needed to be occupied. Without walls to climb or windmills to attack she was the type of person who became depressed. She knew this. The feeling lived inside her somewhere - probably nestled close to her solar plexus. Yes, it seemed like that was the case. She felt it right in her chest. So, to escape dwelling on her anxieties - which she was prone to do - Elza lived in a state of perpetual movement. If she slowed down or was obstructed, even for a moment, she would suffer being left alone with herself, and then all would be lost.
— Mark Fitter
Mrs. Baker's social manner was almost robotlike in its perfection. All her comments and remarks were natural, normal, everyday currency, but one had a suspicion that the whole thing was like an actor playing a part for perhaps the seven hundredth time. It was an automatic performance, completely divorced from what Mrs. Baker might really have been thinking or feeling.
— Agatha Christie, Destination Unknown
Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?
— René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Enlightenment is to replace your own self with the self of the universe!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - "Meglio scrivere per se stessi e non avere un pubblico piuttosto che scrivere per gli altri e non essere se stessi".
— Cyril Connolly
Let the statues crumble. You have always been the place.
— Sarah Kay, The Type
I take my cues from the world around me and carefully paint a self-portrait that the world can’t help but accept. However, I would be much wiser to put down all such artistic notions and hold up the portrait of me painted by God simply because that is a picture at which the world can’t help but marvel.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time.
— Daniel M. Wegner
It's like we act as a mirror for the environment, or to a broader aspect, the universe.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
Human nature has nevertheless been changed by the ever new appearance of these teachers of the purpose of existence: It now has one additional need—the need for the ever new appearance of such teachers and teachings of a “purpose.” Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life—without faith in reason in life.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Your personality of the mind is like a castle of sand around the sea. The time you begin to disassociate yourself with different experiences and impressions of both the external and internal world, you won’t find anything inside.
— Roshan Sharma
It's difficult to become someone you don't know at all. It's difficult, indeed, to become yourself.
— Michal Coret, Becoming What I Might Be
He remembered hearing Karl tell James once that it was hard for people to ever know what they really looked like. Reflections in mirrors weren’t accurate, Karl said, because when you stared at yourself in a mirror, you subconsciously composed your face in a way that wasn’t your natural expression.Marvin wondered it that was true when you were with strangers too. Maybe you only looked like your true self with the people you loved. And maybe that was a face you yourself hardly ever got to see…
— Elise Broach, Masterpiece
But if time exists only in my head, and I'm the last human being, it will end with my death. The thought cheers me. I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion. I'm owed some gratitude, but no one after my death will know I murdered time. Really these thoughts are quite meaningless. Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself.
— Marlen Haushofer, The Wall
There is no God besides the Self. One who knows the Self, knows God.
— Abhijit Naskar
One who knows the Self, knows God.
— Abhijit Naskar