Quotes About Self

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.

Everyone has a self-destructive nature in them. It's whether you feed it or not. You don't have to be a pop star to feel connected to destruction or self-destruction. But self-destruction is self-obsession, and self-obsession is not really possible if you're engaged in raising children. And if you have a spiritual life, you're constantly being asked to see yourself as one small fragment in the bigger picture.

The universe must be experienced as the Great Self. Each is fulfilled in the other: the Great Self is fulfilled in the individual self, the individual self is fulfilled in the Great Self. Alienation is overcome as soon as we experience this surge of energy from the source that has brought the universe through the centuries. New fields of energy become available to support the human venture. These new energies find expression and support in celebration. For in the end the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration. It is all an exuberant expression of existence itself.

The journey into self-love and self-acceptance must begin with self-examination. ... until you take the journey of self-reflection, it is almost impossible to grow or learn in life.

It isn't possible to kill part of your “self” unless you kill yourself first. If you ruin your conscious personality, the so-called ego-personality, you deprive the self of its real goal, namely to become real itself. The goal of life is the realization of the self. If you kill yourself you abolish that will of the self to become real, but it may arrest your personal development inasmuch it is not explained. You ought to realise that suicide is murder, since after suicide there remains a corpse exactly as with any ordinary murder. Only it is yourself that has been killed.

Concentration is not thinking of one thing. On the contrary, it is excluding all thoughts, since all thoughts obstruct the sense of one's true being. All efforts are to be directed simply to removing the veil of ignorance. Concentrating the mind solely on the Self will lead to happiness or bliss. Drawing in the thoughts, restraining them and preventing them from straying outwards is called detachment (vairagya). Fixing them in the Self is spiritual practice (sadhana). Concentrating on the heart is the same as concentrating on the Self. Heart is another name for Self.

...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.

I" cannot reach fulfillment without "thou." The self cannot be self without other selves. Self-concern without other-concern is like a tributary that has no outward flow to the ocean.

We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when the power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest.

So spirituality itself should be self satisfying. If you are spiritually endowed, then you are self satisfied. And this self satisfaction within you will lead you to that ocean of joy about which I've been telling you and all the scriptures have described.

The self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of the individual. Anything that a [person] postulates as being a greater totality than [oneself] can become a symbol of the self. For this reason the symbol of the self is not always as total as the definition would require.

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.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

This new meta-system is very much in favor of the self, but a self that is based on a proper sense of dignity, not on an inflated ego. A person who dare not admit he is wrong inflates his ego but weakens his self.

Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide with the self-interest of the rest of the world. That's inevitable.

Do not desire, for what you desire you get, and with it comes terrible bondage. It is nothing but bringing "noses on us," as in the case of the man who had three boons to ask. We never get freedom until we are self-contained. "Self is the Saviour of self, none else."

a mother's death also means the loss of the consistent, supportive family system that once supplied her with a secure home base, she then has to develop her self-confidence and self-esteem through alternate means. Without a mother or mother-figure to guide her, a daughter also has to piece together a female self-image of her own.

Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

We may think that justice is everyone being equal, having the same rights, sharing the same kind of advantages, but maybe we have not had the chance to look at the nature of justice in terms of no-self. That kind of justice is based on the idea of self, but it may be very interesting to explore justice in terms of no-self.

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.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

Where we see self esteem, we see self acceptance. High self esteem individual tend to avoid falling into an adversarial relationship with themselves.

An important aspect of self-compassion is to be able to empathically hold both parts of ourselves-the self that regrets a past action and the self that took the action in the first place.

Whatever a man loves he inevitably clings to, and in order not to lose it he rejects everything that keeps him from it. So he who loves God cultivates pure prayer, driving out every passion that keeps him from it. He who drives out self-love, the mother of the passions, will with God's help easily rid himself of the rest, such as anger, irritation, rancor and so on. But he who is dominated by self-love is overpowered by the other passions, even against his will. Self-love is the passion of attachment to the body.

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

The real self and the public self are intertwined, like a tumor around an organ, and you can't cut the tumor or you'll kill the organ, so they live together, until the tumor chokes the organ off - but which self is the tumor?. Or it's like something out of Star Trek. The Borg.

Those who condemn the self-righteous for the sake of self-discovery do so with ironic self-righteousness.

You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.

God bless him, I mean a lot of times you get non-actors on a set and they get really self-conscious, especially when doing something crazy like singing along with Phil Collins. They get sort of reserved and self-conscious. Mike [Tyson] completely trusted Todd [Phillips] and totally put everything into it.

Great art is more than a transient refreshment. It is something which adds to the permanent richness of the soul's self-attainment. It justifies itself both by its immediate enjoyment, and also by its discipline of the inmost being. Its discipline is not distinct from enjoyment but by reason of it. It transforms the soul into the permanent realization of values extending beyond its former self.

If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.

The unmet need that can get met right now is the need to be whole, to be both your magnificent, divine self and your imperfect, human self.

The saying "no self, no problem" probably comes from Zen. In their cultures, where Buddhism is kind of taken for granted, as well as karma, causality, former and future life, and the possibility for becoming enlightened, then it's safe to skirt the danger of nihilism, which would be, I don't exist because Buddha said I have no self, and therefore I have no problem because I don't exist. That would be a bad misunderstanding. But in those cultures, it would not be as easy to have that understanding as it would be here in the west, where we really are nihilistic.

Muhammad is more human, more self-doubting, even self-tortured at times. His story is full of adventure, intrigue, betrayal.

Travel challenges truths that we were raised thinking were self-evident and God-given. Leaving home, we learn other people find different truths to be self-evident. We realize that it just makes sense to give everyone a little wiggle room.

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government-that is despotism.

Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.

When your self and your life belong to your being, your self opens, your life opens, your being comes in, and it will have everything. It is the single greatest turning point in your life.

Neither fear nor self-interest can convert the soul. They may change the appearance, perhaps even the conduct, but never the object of supreme desire... Fear is the motive which constrains the slave; greed binds the selfish man, by which he is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed (James 1:14). But neither fear nor self-interest is undefiled, nor can they convert the soul. Only charity can convert the soul, freeing it from unworthy motives.

Self-acceptance begets acceptance from others, which begets even deeper, more genuine self-acceptance. It can be done. But no one is going to bestow it on you. It is a gift only you can give yourself.

No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave.

There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .

What you do for your Self, you do for another. What you do for another, you do for the Self. This is because you and the other are one. And this is because...there is naught but You.

You will eat not to satisfy your palate but your hunger. A self-indulgent man lives to eat; a self-restrained man eats to live.

The things that make me laugh are considered smart or whatever, I guess. But stuff that's self-consciously intelligent or self-consciously hip or cool, that doesn't do it for me either. You just try to be funny.

[Iggi Pop] is very self-taught, self-educated, but, man, that guy knows about so many things.

Sincerity does not only complete the self; it is the means by which all things are completed. As the self is completed, there is human-heartedness; as things are completed, there is wisdom. This is the virtue of one’s character, and the Way of joining the internal and external. Thus, when we use this, everything is correct.