Self Quotes

Though we travel the world over to find beauty, we must carry it with us or we find it not . . . The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in beholders.

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

Carrying body and soul and embracing the one, Can you avoid separation?

On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do.

We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.

That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.

Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart.

You are the Hero of your own Story.

Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

A friend is a second self, so that our consciousness of a friend's existence...makes us more fully conscious of our own existence.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.

The real man is the one Unit Existence.

People travel to marvel at the mountains, seas, rivers and stars and they pass right by themselves without astonishment.

Your life is an island separated from all other islands and continents. Regardless of how many boats you send to other shores or how many ships arrive upon your shores, you yourself are an island separated by its own pains, secluded in its happiness

After having been lost in the world, suddenly, through the pressure of suffering, the realization comes that the answers may not be found out there in worldly attainment and in the future. That's an important point for many people to reach. That sense of deep crisis-when the world as they have known it, and the sense of self that they have known that is identified with the world, become meaningless.

Let me tell you what I look like: pale face, long hair, and a tiny start of a paunch. In addition, an awkward gait, and a cigar in the mouth and a pen in pocket or hand.

Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother: I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

Motion is always a relative thing. I move in relation to something else. Any particle in this universe can change in relation to any other particle; but take the whole universe as one, and in relation to what can it move? There is nothing besides it. So this infinite Unit is unchangeable, immovable, absolute, and this is the Real Man.

In you, as in each human being, there is a dimension of consciousness far deeper than thought. It is the very essence of who you are. We may call it presence, awareness, the unconditioned consciousness.

Man is his own worst enemy.

If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility. You alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts.

If you are ready to wake up, you are going to wake up. If you're not you are going to stay pretending that you are just a poor little me.

The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.

You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.

For when you see that the universe cannot be distinguished from how you act upon it, there is neither fate nor free will, self nor other. There is simply one all-inclusive Happening, in which your personal sensation of being alive occurs in just the same way as the river flowing and the stars shining far out in space. There is no question of submitting or accepting or going with it, for what happens in and as you is no different from what happens as it.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

Are you the new person drawn toward me?

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Pain and happiness are simply conditions of the ego. Forget the ego.

When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, "I am all this!" There is simply all this.

The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.

You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot - it's all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

According to this philosophy, each man consists of three parts - the body, the internal organ or the mind, and behind that, what is called the Atman, the Self.

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.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate "you" to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real "you" is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

When the intelligent and animal souls are held together in one embrace, they can be kept from separating.

I was surprised when I started getting old. I always thought it was one of those things that would happen to someone else.

Everyone likes me, yet nobody understands me.

So as through a glass and darklyThe age long strife I seeWhere I fought in many guises,Many names - but always me.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.

two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there.

To connect with people, be yourself, at your best.

Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast.

Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside, but only the crust.

Almost every one flatters himself that he and his are exceptionable.

Nature, body, mind go to death, not we. We neither go nor come. The man Vivekananda is in nature, is born and dies. But the Self we see as Vivekananda is never born and never dies. It is the eternal and unchangeable Reality.

The fact that man produces a concept "I" besides the totality of his mental and emotional experiences or perceptions does not prove that there must be any specific existence behind such a concept. We are succumbing to illusions produced by our self-created language, without reaching a better understanding of anything. Most of so-called philosophy is due to this kind of fallacy.