Self Quotes

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

A man's name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him...but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.

The symbols of the self arise from the depths of the body.

A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others.

People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

Identification with one's office or title is very attractive indeed, which is precisely why so many men are nothing more than the decorum accorded to them by society. In vain would one look for a personality behind the husk. Underneath one would find a very pitiable little creature. That is why the office is so attractive: it offers easy compensation for personal deficiencies.

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.

YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side,' said the dewdrop to the lake.

The secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.

What was my body to me? A kind of flunkey in my service. Let but my anger wax hot, my love grow exalted, my hatred collect in me, and that boasted solidarity between me and my body was gone.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.

There is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it.

He has no worse enemy than himself.

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.

Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning - I am surely far different from what you suppose; Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade—this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.

Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate tolay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies.

The real person you are is revealed in the moments when you're certain no other person is watching. When no one is watching, you are driven by what you expect of yourself.

Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

I'm too busy acting like I'm not Naive. I've seen it all, I was here first.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours,' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others.

Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed.

Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don't see the self as self, what do we have to fear?

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward sensesare still truly adjusted to each other.

The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.

Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.

The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

You must therefore love me, myself, and not my circumstances, if we are to be real friends.

That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.

Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life.

The most deeply compelled action is also the freest action. By that I mean, no part of you is outside the action.

I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.

They would not find me changed from him they knew - only more sure of all I thought was true.

A true friend is a sort of second self.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

My potential is more than can be expressed within the bounds of my race or ethnic identity.

Peace… starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.

Where-so-ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference - you are all of them....and when they come into being, that's you coming into being.

Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in Nature for fabrics in which local and spasmodic energy is required.

...Sometimes I dream that everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly, and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness- and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.

I see for Nature no defeatIn one tree's overthrowOr for myself in my retreatFor yet another blow.

I could give all to Time except--exceptWhat I myself have held.

The most effective strategy for successful living is really no strategy at all. It is, rather, to be real, to be honest, to be authentic, to be you.

Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees.

Have the courage to take your own thoughts seriously, for they will shape you.

The hallucination of being a separate ego will not stand up to biological tests.

Even within one person, yesterday and today, there are differences. We must look at a deeper level.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.

There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron show,--the rootsof all things are in man.

Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment,your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit.

When I lay down the reins of this administration, I want to have one friend left. And that friend is myself.

Everything is interconnected. Myinterest is linked to everyone else's. Our survival and future are linked. Therefore the destruction of your so-called enemy is actually the destruction of your self.