Self quotes
12.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside self — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"When someone becomes transparent, then something shines through that person that has nothing to do with the person or any of his or her personal history. What is required is becoming so transparent that the self or ego dissolves."
"When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made "me." That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That's why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces."
"When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind itself is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are."
"If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with. Maybe, I thought, only one of them is real."
"There's nothing cool about being self-destructive."
"Our sexual self is a complex combination of our social, cultural, and biological inheritance."
"There's a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That's all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has a greater need to be that way. It's a response to a world that's always using a can opener to open them up to see what's inside, wondering whether it ought to be replaced with a more useful sort of preserves."
"I have this self-conscious inclination to just say "anyone who hates it, that's cool that's fine!""
"All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself - a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater."
"It seems to me self-evident that we cannot have capitalism without capital and, very importantly, that the ultimate source of all economic capital is Nature's capital"
"Most of us have very clear memories of the self-critical internal conversation running on in our heads while we were playing poorly, and yet it often seems that we hardly remember noticing it at all while we were playing well."
"Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved."
"While his history of depression is compatible with suicide... and the location and direction of the stab wounds are consistent with self-infliction, several aspects of the circumstances (as they are known at this time) are atypical of suicide and raise the possibility of homicide."
"One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers."
"Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?"
"Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life."
"I do not see them here; but after death God knows I know the faces I shall see, Each one a murdered self, with low last breath. 'I am thyself,what hast thou done to me?' 'And Iand Ithyself,' (lo! each one saith,) 'And thou thyself to all eternity!"
"Everyone tells me I've had such an interesting life, but sometimes I think it's been nothing but stomach disturbances and self-concern."
"If you wou'd be reveng'd of your enemy, govern your self"
"Self-help is the best help"
