Self quotes

Self

12.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

12.5K quotes

Explore further

Browse quotes that often appear alongside self — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.

Quote collection

Self quotes (page 182 of 626)

Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.

Kenny Smith Basketball Player
Self

"Human cultures are all experiments in trying to find a form that will fit the matter of our immediacy; but it is absolutely not the case that all such experiments are of equal merit or value. Some cultures - and modernity is patently one - have managed to transmute consciousness into the "disease" that Nietzsche called it, the self-affliction of a self-centeredness that has purged itself of all vestiges of wisdom and value."

Read quote 3 likes
Kenny Smith Basketball Player
Self

"In all technai or arts (medicine perhaps most of all), there is a self-exhilaration on the part of the practitioner (the intoxication of the ego with its own potency) which is infectious: the patient enjoys a placebo-effect which redounds to the ego of the "artist.""

Read quote 3 likes
Kenny Smith Basketball Player
Self

""The people" is that massive portion of a society that lives by its pathetic subjection to sheer immediacy or self-obviousness, and that therefore uncritically seizes upon the most simplistic and abstract ways of filling its vacuous self-consciousness. Not philosophy but dogma and rhetoric, not rationality but indoctrination and conditioning, provide the cultural junkfood by which the Many perfunctorily slake their thirst and hunger."

Read quote 3 likes
Kenny Smith Basketball Player
Self

"As always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself: in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion)."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry Louis Gates Scholar, Historian
Self

"The thing about living in a village at the foot of a mountain is that the world for you becomes, without thinking about it, self-contained. People are of two kinds, really: from the Valley, and from Elsewhere."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry Miller Novelist, Essayist
Self

"You must be life for me to the very end," so he writes. "That is the only way in which to sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It's hard to talk of one's self so intimately"

Read quote 3 likes
Henry Miller Novelist, Essayist
Self

"To be cured, we must rise from our graves and throw off the cerements of the dead. Nobody can do it for another - it is a private affair which is best done collectively. We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separated and self-hypnotized, but individual and related."

Read quote 3 likes
Lew Wallace Author, Politician
Self

"Sympathy is in great degree a result of the mood we are in at the moment; anger forbids the emotion. On the other hand, it is easiest taken on when we are in a state of most absolute self-satisfaction."

Read quote 3 likes
Lewis Carroll Author, Mathematician
Self

"When I come upon anything-in Logic or in any other hard subject-that entirely puzzles me, I find it a capital plan to talk it over, aloud, even when I am all alone. One can explain things so clearly to one's self! And then, you know, one is so patient with one's self: one never gets irritated at one's own stupidity!"

Read quote 3 likes
Lewis Buzbee Author
Self

"Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside."

Read quote 3 likes
Lewis Mumford Philosopher, Author
Self

"If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul."

Read quote 3 likes
Lewis Thomas Physician, Author
Self

"Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. ... It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun"

Read quote 3 likes
Lewis Thomas Physician, Author
Self

"The whole dear notion of one's own Self-marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self- is a myth."

Read quote 3 likes
Lewis Thomas Physician, Author
Self

"The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we seem capable of levels of folly and self-destruction to be found nowhere else in all of nature. But if we keep at it and keep alive, we are in for one surprise after another. We can build structures for human society never seen before, thoughts never heard before, music never heard before."

Read quote 3 likes
Lewis Thomas Physician, Author
Self

"Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self."

Read quote 3 likes