Quotes About Self

For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self YOU have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted : And I no longer want this false self. But now, Father, I come to You in your own Son's self ... and it is He Who Presents me to You.

Then ego goes on growing, because the society needs you as an ego, not as a Self. The Self is irrelevant for the society; your periphery is meaningful. And there are many problems. The ego can be taught and the ego can be made docile and the ego can be forced to be obedient. The ego can be made to adjust, but not the Self. The Self cannot be taught, the Self cannot be forced. The Self is intrinsically rebellious, individual. It cannot be made a part of society.

The idea that somehow "no self, no problem"- I don't exist because I don't have a self- would be a mistaken understanding. However, the selflessness teaching is not that hard to understand. What it means is a type of self that people feel they have, like a fixed, unchanging identity. Either they know they have it, or for some, they feel they need to seek it, and possibly have an experience where they feel like they found something. That type of fixed, unchanging, essential self, or absolute self doesn't exist. That's what "no self" means.

The idea of the self interests me a great deal. What is the self? And finding yourself, and which self? In a way, we're more than one self, but you somehow try to get to a rock bottom self.

There is no reaching the Self. If Self were to be reached, it would mean that the Self is not here and now but that it is yet to be obtained. What is got afresh will also be lost. So it will be impermanent. What is not permanent is not worth striving for. So I say the Self is not reached. You are the Self; you are already That.

The child is born with a Self but not with an ego. The child develops the ego. As he becomes more and more social and related, ego develops. This ego is just on your periphery where you are related with others - just on the boundary of your being. So ego is the periphery of your being, and Self is the center. The child is born with a Self, but unaware. He is a Self, but he is not conscious of the Self.

True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There's no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected. Once you are aware of that you are no longer caught in the idea that you are a separate entity.

Perhaps the greatest barrier to revival on a large scale is the fact that we are to interested in a great display. We want an exhibition; God is looking for a man who will throw himself entirely on God. Whenever self-effort, self-glory, self-seeking or self-promotion enters into the work of revival, then God leaves us to ourselves.

Two ideas are psychologically deep-rooted in man: self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and security, just as a child depends on its parent. For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal Soul or Atman, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.

It is said that “there is a self,” but “non-self” too is taught. The buddhas also teach there is nothing which is “neither self nor non-self.” Everything is real, not real; both real and not real; neither not real nor real: this is the teaching of the Buddha.

Christianity in the West, opens up a perspective of depth into what it means to be a self. And that depth of the self is something that is experienced in the sight of God. So that the great thinkers of self and subjectivity are Paul and Augustine. They look at the self from the perspective of God and they find themselves wretched and interesting. Constituted by conflictual desires.

All your experiences, all your meditations, all your prayer, all that you do, is self-centred. It is strengthening the self, adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self-centred activity.

The basis of self-ownership is the fact that each person has direct control over the scarce resource of his body and therefore has a better claim to it than any third party (and any third party seeking to dispute my self-ownership must presuppose the principle of self-ownership in the first place since he is acting as a self-owner).

Self-knowledge involves relationship. To know oneself is to study one self in action with another person. Relationship is a process of self evaluation and self revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.

He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle.

The idea of self-government is foreign to Americans. ... Self-government is a form of self-control, self-limitation. It goes against our whole grain. We're supposed to go after what we want, not question whether we really need it.

The battle for self-discipline may leave you a bit bruised and battered but always a better person. Self-discipline is a rigorous process at best; too many of us want it to be effortless and painless. Should temporary setbacks afflict us, a very significant part of our struggle for self-discipline is the determination and the courage to try again....Eternal life in the kingdom of our Father is your goal, and self-discipline will surely be required if you are to achieve it.

The challenge life presents to each of us is to become truly ourselves--not the self we have imagined or fantasized about, not the self that our friends want us to be, not the self our ego would have us be, but the self God has ordained us to be from before we were in our mother's womb.

...Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.

Without self-respect there can be no genuine success. Success won at the cost of self-respect is not success ? for what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own self-respect.

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

Self-discipline is the key to personal greatness. It is the magic quality that opens all doors for you, and makes everything else possible. With self-discipline, the average person can rise as far and as fast as his talents and intelligence can take him. But without self-discipline, a person with every blessing of background, education and opportunity will seldom rise above mediocrity.

Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.

Yet each of us also carries another portrait with us, a picture far more important than any in our wallet. Psychologists have a name for it. They call that mental picture of ourselves, our self-image. ... there's always the person whose self-image is bent all out of shape, like a photo carried too long in a wallet.The good news of the tremendous worth we have in God's eyes can light up our inner self-portrait.

The Prayer of Examine produces within us the priceless grace of self-knowledge. I wish I could adequately explain to you how great a grace this truly is. Unfortunately, contemporary men and women simply do not value self-knowledge in the same way that all preceding generations have. For us technocratic knowledge reigns supreme. Even when we pursue self-knowledge, we all too often reduce it to a hedonistic search for personal peace and prosperity. How poor we are! Even the pagan philosophers were wiser than this generation. They knew that an unexamined life was not worth living.

There is no second, or higher self to search for. You are the highest self, only give up the false ideas you have about your self.

Nothing destroys self-worth, self-acceptance and self-love faster than denying what you feel. Without feelings, you would not know where you are in life. Nor would you know what areas you need to work on. Honor your feelings. Allow yourself to feel them.

Ballet dancers are a self-chosen elite. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. One other factor is difficult to predetermine: without a certain admixture of hysteria - sometimes masking as self-obsession, sometimes even counterfeiting incipient madness - performers, at once acrobats, artists, and animals, make little public impression.

I'm fascinated by what makes up a self, how one becomes a self, how much is it an answer to others and how much is it an essence of self.

It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.

I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs.

Your false self is always that which is passing away. Your true self doesn't go up or down, it's constant - it's a rock. Once you learn how to live there, what others say about you, your failures or successes - these don't send you on a roller coaster ride down or up. It's really the only way to peace. There's no other way to be peaceful except in the true self.

What does God hate or punish except self-will? Let self-will cease, and there will be no hell. On what does that fire feed except on self-will?

True listening is never self-effacement. We bring the whole self to the process, rather than denying self. When we truly listen, we aren't just waiting for someone else to decide something so we can get on with things, or so we don't have to decide for ourselves. We aren't giving away our own powers to be seen and heard. When we listen, first we listen to the parts of ourselves that are curious, in avoidance, afraid, angry, or proud. Then we can take a breath and sink, allowing those parts some space alongside the spaciousness of not knowing.

Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering.

Since karma is meeting self, we acquire karma as we meet self in our many attitudes and emotions; when we serve in loving kindness and patience or hold resentful malicious thoughts What we do to our fellow man we do to our Maker our karma or problem is within self.

Bring your whole self to work. I don't believe we have a professional self Monday through Friday and a real self the rest of the time. It is all professional and it is all personal.

Work on your stony qualities and become resplendent like the ruby. Practice self-denial and accept difficulty. Always see infinite life in letting the self die. Your stoniness will decrease; your ruby nature will grow. The signs of self-existence will leave your body, and ecstasy will take you over.

The Last Arrow transcends a moment or an issue. It is a call to move beyond self-indulgence to a life of sacrificial service. In The Last Arrow I address a broad spectrum of issues from the Syrian refugee crisis to the cultural epidemic of depression to the personal struggle of insignificance. The Last Arrow is a clarion call to make a difference in the world rather than a self-help book for personal self-improvement.

I'm still a researcher. The best way to explain it is that I trusted myself deeply as a professional, but I did not have a lot of self-trust personally. When I started learning all of these things about the value and the importance of belonging, vulnerability, connection, self-kindness and self-compassion, I trusted what I was learning - again, I know I'm a good researcher. When those things and wholeheartedness started to emerge with all these different properties, I knew I had to listen. I'd heard these messages before personally but I didn't trust myself there.

place where man laughs, sings, picks flowers, chases butterflies and pets birds, makes love with maidens, and plays with children. Here he spontaneously reveals his nature, the base as well as the noble. Here also he buries his sorrows and difficulties and cherishes his ideals and hopes. It is in the garden that men discover themselves. Indeed one discovers not only his real self but also his ideal self?he returns to his youth. Inevitably the garden is made the scene of man's merriment, escapades, romantic abandonment, spiritual awakening or the perfection of his finer self.

All human professions, institutions, and activities must be integral with the earth as the primary self-nourishing , self-governing and self-fulfilling community. To integrate our human activities within this context is our way into the future.

I think seriousness is a mask of self-importance and self-importance in turn is a mask for self-pity. So if you're really going to pursue a spiritual way of living in the world, you must be lighthearted and carefree, have humor, be able to tolerate ambiguity and embrace uncertainty, and be forgiving of yourself and everybody else.

It seems to me that everyone on this planet whom I know or have worked with is suffering from self-hatred and guilt to one degree or another. The more self-hatred and guilt we have, the less our lives work. The less self-hatred and guilt we have, the better our lives work, on all levels.

We are wont to condemn self-love; but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves.

I always return to Paris, taking my selves along - past self, customary self, the self I never had.

As Hubert Benoit said, it is not the identification with the ego that is the problem, but the exclusive nature of the identification. When our self-identity expands beyond the ego, into the deeper psychic, then even into the Unborn and One Taste, the ego is simply taken up and subsumed in a grander identity. But the ego itself remains as the functional self in the gross realm, and it might even appropriately be intensified and made more powerful, simply because it is now plugged into the entire Kosmos.

I've learned through the years how to base my identity and sense of self-worth on myself and not others. I've learned the most critical tool of all: self-love. Now, if it doesn't work out with someone, sure, I'll be hurt. But I'll be bruised, not broken. And I may lose my balance, but I won't be wiped off my feet.