Ego quotes
1.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside ego — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era--but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything."
"When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego ... things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in."
"Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could spare them from all suffering? No, it wouldn't. They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external form of things. Suffering drives you deeper. The paradox is that suffering is caused by identification with form and erodes identification with form. A lot of it is caused by the ego, although eventually suffering destroys the ego-but not until you suffer consciously."
"The ego's form of happiness can't exist without unhappiness. The ego will be happy when something good happens but unhappy when it ends."
"The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are."
"Fighting your ego is a melodrama of the ego."
"Boasting, like gilded armour, is very different inside from outside."
"The ego tells you to fill space. Your spirit tells you to let space fill you."
"They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work."
"Fear of death only comes through the brittleness of the ego."
"The ego is a tool. You don't separate it. It's a tool for the spirit."
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"The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure."
"There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed."
"The world is a demon. It is a kingdom of which the puny ego is king. Put it away and stand firm."
"Nations have their ego, just like individuals."
"After all, conflict arises, does it not, through the desire to be something, to be other than what is."
"I love playing ego and insecurity combined."
"A lot of people say Jerry Lee Lewis done wrong, but that has yet to be proven in the eyes of God."
"Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands."
