Self quotes
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside self — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"A great deal of my battle, as an actor, is to whittle away the things that make me self-conscious and try to trick myself into not being self-conscious. So, it's always a challenge, whether I'm lying in a hospital bed or flying around with a rocket pack on my back, or what have you. On the best of days, it's a challenge for me."
"A great deal of my battle, as an actor, is to widdle away the things that make me self-conscious and try to trick myself into not being self-conscious."
"Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot tolerate having words wrapped around it. What it craves is secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you stay quiet, you stay in a lot of self-judgment."
"But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself."
"It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat."
"Well, I have considered myself to be very fortunate in that I have been able to do mostly only that which my inner self told me to do... I am also aware that I do receive much criticism from the outside world for what I do and some people actually get angry at me. But this does not really touch me because I feel that these people do not live in he same world as do I."
"Man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground."
"An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality."
"No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality."
"The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions"
"The legs, for example, of that chair--how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes--or was it several centuries?--not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them---or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair."
"The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure."
"In high school, I was so painfully self-aware that how I thought of myself was probably very different from what other people thought of me. I thought of myself as just painfully awkward and dorky. I had a lot of hair and was kind of weird. I sang a lot in the hallways."
"jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force."
"I was not really angry: I felt for him all the time, and longed to be reconciled; but I determined he should make the first advances, or at least show some signs of an humble and contrite spirit, first; for, if I began, it would only minister to his self-conceit, increase his arrogance, and quite destroy the lesson I wanted to give him."
"It's so great to be able to make people laugh, because this is so often how we get our selves back."
"Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained."
"With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made."
"The self in a toroidal Universe can be both separate and connected with everything else."
"Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality."
