SCHOLAR ISLAND
Self
"But if a man happens to find himself he has a mansion which he can
inhabit with dignity all the the days of his life."
James Michener
"He who knows himself, knows the All"
-Hermes Trismegistos
"The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself."
-Montaigne
"One's own self is well hidden from one's own self:
Of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
"let us....learn how to accept ourselves-accept the truth that we are capable in some directions and limited in others, that genius is rare, that mediocrity is the portion of almost all of us, but that all of can contribute from the storehouse of our skills to the enrichment of our common life. Let us accept our emotional frailties, knowing that every person has some phobia lurking within his mind and that the normal person is he who is willing to accept life with its limitations and its opportunities joyfully and courageously."
-Joshua Loth Liebman
"I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and the time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and I thought, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be.....when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am."
-Biff Loman, Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
"The phenomenon of alienation has other clinical aspects, which I can discuss only briefly. Not only are all forms of depression, dependence and idol worship (including the "fanatic") direct expressions of, or compensations for, alienation: the phenomenon of the failure to experience one's identity which is a central phenomenon at the root of psychopathological phenomena is also a result of alienation. Precisely because the alienated person has transformed his own functions of feeling and thought to an object outside he is not himself, he has no sense of "I," of identity. This lack of sense of identity has many consequences. The most fundamental and general one is that it prevents integration of the total personality, hence it leaves the person disunited within himself, lacking either capacity "to will one thing"* or if he seems to will one thing his will lacks authenticity."
=Erich Fromm * Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing - S. Kierkegaard
Beyond the Chains of Illusion
"Resolve to be thyself: and Know, that he/ Who finds himself, loses his misery."
-Matthew Arnold
"I feel internal peace because I know every fate is predestined."
-Fathi Eljahmi (letter from prison to Khadafi by one of the bravest dissidents of our time)
"I will not accept this appointment because, in the current political environment, only pimps and prostitutes thrive."
(Fathi Ejahmi in reply to the offer of a 'position' in Libyan government)
"I dote on myself.....There is a lot of me, and all so luscious."
-Walt Whitman
"Men can starve from alack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread."
-Richard Wright
"The Self is a momentary stay against confusion."
-Emerson
"Every human being's essential nature is perfect and faultless, but after years of immersion in the world we easily forget our roots and take on a counterfeit nature."
-Lao-tzu
"When a man begins to understand himself he begins to live. When he begins to live he begins to understand his fellow men."
-Norvin G. McGranahan
"The Kingdom of Heaven is within you and whoever knows himself shall find it. Know your Self."
-Jesus, Oxyrhynchus Manuscript
"It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too."
-Josh Billings
"Gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself....is to know human nature and human destiny.....Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously, to know God."
Elaine Pagels
"like is knowable to like alone....Make thyself to grow to the same stature as the Greatness which transcends all measure...Conceiving nothing is impossible unto thyself, think thyself deathless and able to know all-all arts, all sciences, the way of every life."
Hermes Trismegistos
"By all means use some times to be alone.
Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear."
-George Herbert
"No man should part with his own individuality and become that of another."
-Channing
"Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread."
-Richard Wright
"There's another man within me, that's angry with me."
-Sir Thomas Brown Religio medici written 3 1/2 centuries ago
"To know oneself, one should assert oneself."
-Albert Camus
"All of the significant battles are waged within the self."
Sheldon Kopp
"it's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune but just yourself that kept things from you."
-Lillian Hellman
"There is just one life for each of us: our own."
-Euripides
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them and be Expert in home-cosmography."
-Henry David Thoreau
"The "Know Thyself" of the temple at Delphi was not an easy maxim to follow as I believed when I wrote my Confessions." The very notion of self-knowledge, which had once seemed so straightforward was growing murky, "What am I , myself? That is what still remains to be discovered."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
-William Shakespeare
"How desperately difficult it is to be honest with oneself. It is easier to be honest with other people."
-Edward F. Benson
"To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to
ourselves-there lies the great, singular power of self-respect."
-Joan Didion
"People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of river, at the vast compass of ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering."
-Saint Augustine
"Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves-so how can we know anyone else?"
-Sydney J. Harris
"When we bury feelings, we also bury ourselves. it means we exist in a state of alienation. We rarely know it, but we are lonely for ourselves."
-Nathaniel Branden
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
"How shall we learn to know ourselves? By reflection? Never; but only through action. Strive to do thy duty: then shalt thou know what is in thee."
-Goethe
"I have discovered, you do not need to know what you are looking for-only that you are looking for something, and need urgently to find it. It is the urgency that does the work, a readiness to receive that finds the answers."
-Janine Pammy Vega
I am not I
I am this one
Who goes by my side without my seeing him
whom, at times, I go to see
and whom, at times, I forget.
He who is silent, serene, when I speak,
he who pardons, sweetly, when I resent,
he who passes through places I am not,
he who will remain standing when I die."
-Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958)
"It's wrong to say I think. Better to say: I am thought....I is an other."
-Arthur Rimbaud, 1871
"Learn what you are and be such."
-Pindar
"Try, also, to be as kind to yourself as possible. Do not measure yourself against others or even against your ideal self. Human betterment is a gradual, two-steps-forward, one-step-back effort."
-Epictetus A.D. 77
"A man who finds no satisfaction in himself, seeks for it in vain elsewhere."
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld
"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie."
-William Shakespeare
"Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult business in the world."
-Cervantes
"My future is one I must make myself."
-Louis L'Amour
"On the occasion of every accident that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use."
-Epictetus
"Whatever you are by nature, keep to it. Never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for and you will succeed; be anything less and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing."
-Sydney Smith
"Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self."
_May Sarton Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
"The easiest thing of all is to deceive one's self; for what a man wishes he generally believes to be true."
-Demosthenes
"Reputation, reputation, reputation!
O, I have lost my reputation!
I have lost the immortal part of myself,
and what remains is bestial.
My reputation, Iago, my reputation!"
-William Shakespeare, Othello, II, iii
"Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is to you."
-Emerson
"The conquest of self is in a sense the inevitable conquest of true self-knowledge. if the self-centered self is shattered by a genuine awareness of its situation, there is the power of a new life in the experience."
-Niebuhr
"The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself."
-Montaigne
"Don't try to find out who you are."
Paul Williams
Das Energi
"Listen to no one who tells you how to love.
Your love is like no other, and that is what makes it beautiful.
Your self is your divinity.
Express your self."
-Paul Williams
Das Energi
"like is knowable to like alone" "Make thyself to grow to the same stature as the Greatness which transcends all measure...." "Conceiving nothing is impossible unto thyself, think thyself deathless and able to know all-all arts, all sciences, the way of every life."
from Hermetic Philosophy
"Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism. Indeed, excessive sensitiveness is only another name for morbid self-consicousness. The cure for it is to make more of our objects, and less of ourselves."
-Bovee
"To be oneself', you say, is all-important. But is one's self really worth the effort?"
-Paul Valery
"I am the owner of the sphere
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Learning makes a man fit company for himself."
-Young
"I celebrate myself, and sing myself.....I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious....And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self."
-Walt Whitman
"It is here that we finally and definitely come to the true idol of the American tribe: not Money or Power or Celebrity or Status, but Self."
-Norman Podhoretz
The Prophets
"Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself."
-Charles de Gaulle
"Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path.....a thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do.....to find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him."
-Thomas Carlyle
"Ninety percent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as a complete strangers to ourselves."
-Sydney J. Harris
"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after."
-Henry David Thoreau
"Self is self and all and alone and responsible."
-Paul Williams
Das Energi
"Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings."
-Samuel Johnson
"You can never have a greater or a less dominion than over yourself."
-Leonardo. da Vinci
"Men who know themselves are no longer fools; they stand on the threshold of the Door of Wisdom."
-Havelock Ellis
"There is no man so low down that the cure for his condition does not lie strictly within himself."
-Thomas L. Masson
"
"Thales was asked what was most difficult to man; he answered: "To Know one's Self."
-Diogenes
"Above all things, reverence yourself."
-Pythagoras
"The first and best victory is to conquer self; to be conquered by self is, of all things, the most shameful and vile."
-Plato
"Let us humbly accept from God even our own nature, and treat it charitably, firmly, intelligently. Not that we are called upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us accept ourselves in spite of the evil and the disease."
-Henri-Frederic Amiel
"Make peace with yourself, and heaven and earth will make peace with you. Endeavor to enter your own inner cell, and you will see the heavens; because the one and the other are one and the same, and when you enter one you see the two."
-St. Isaak of Syria
"Be patient with every one, but above all with yourself. I mean, do not be disturbed because of your imperfections, and always rise up bravely from a fall."
-St. Francis De Sales
"Look well into thyself; there is a source which will always spring up if thou wilt always search there."
-Marcus Aurelius
"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."
-Arthur Schopenhauer
" begin to think that the only real sin is suicide or not being oneself."
-Sir John Woodroffe
"Let no man who can belong to himself belong to another."
-Paracelsus
"No man should part with his own individuality and become that of another."
-Channing
"Let me listen to me and not to them."
-Gertrude Stein
"Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail."
-John Donne
"A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge."
-Joseph Conrad
"Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself."
-Michel De Montaigne
"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself-and be lenient to everybody else."
-Beecher
"Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself."
-Lessing
"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself."
-Thomas Paine
"...the self that inhabits your body today is only similar to, not identical with, the self that will inhabit your body tomorrow."
-Hume
"Besides those spires so spick and span
Against an unencumbered sky
The old Great Western Railway ran
When someone different was I."
-Alfred Douglas
"When you come to know your-selves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father."
(-Gnostic text found at Nag Hammadi)
"The Holy Scriptures shout that man should be freed from self, for being freed from self you are self-controlled, and as you are self-controlled you are self-possessed, and as you are self-possessed you posses God and all creation. I tell you the truth: as sure as God is God and I am man, if you could be freed of self-as free as you are of the highest angels-then you would have the nature of the highest angel as completely as you now have your own."
-Meister Eckhart
"Knowledge and science is to understand,
To know who you are.
If you don't know who you are,
What is the use of reading and learning?
-Yunus Emre
"To realize one's destiny is a person's only obligation."
-Paulo Coelho
"There is no reality except the one contained within us."
-Herman Hesse
"If you don't believe in yourself, that probably makes it unanimous."
-Henry Ford
"Everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves. You can't let the world judge you too much."
-actress Ruth Gordon playing Maude in the film "Harold & Maud" 1971
"You must find your own path. Go your own way, which is both terrifying and exhilarating. No one can tell you any longer the way, but only a way-your way, which is as valid as any other as long as you live it honestly."
-Robert Johnson
Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth
"Each man is an island
We are all one being.
Each man is an island, alone, cut-off, distant full
of the pain of that distance, reaching out every moment
to ease his loneliness, becoming ever more conscious of
his alone-ness, moving heaven and earth to fill that
empty place, that gnawing hunger, that bottomless pit
of the heart that is always deepest just at the moment
you think you've finally filled it. It is absurd.
It is unbearable, it is the force that keeps us going.
the destroyer of peace, the sole motivation, outward
urge, the source of all pain and joy, hope and despair.
hatred, love, the meaning of life.
We are all one being, nothing more, nothing less.
We are each alone, cut off from our Self by oceans of
distance, struggling for awareness but blinded by terror, desperate for peace but unable to rest.
Each man is an island
Each island is an extension of the same damn planet."
Paul Willias
Das Energi
"No man is free who cannot command himself."
-Pythagoras
"To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright."
-Walter Benjamin
"There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self."
-Aldous Huxley
"To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
-e.e. cummings
"One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star."
-G.K. Chesterton
"One must learn to love oneself....with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
"If you do not ask yourself what it is you know, you will go on listening to others and change will not come because you will not hear your own truth."
-St. Bartholomew
"My own thoughts
Are my companions; my designs and labors
And aspirations are my only friends."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Masque of Pandora
"The first and best victory is to conquer self; to be conquered by self is, of all things, the most shameful and vile."
-Plato
"Most do violence to their natural aptitude, and thus attain superiority in nothing."
-Baltasar Gracian
"The Self is the most individual core of the most individual person and simultaneously the human self, that is, the Self of all humanity."
-Marie-Louise von Franz
"Be wisely selfish."
-Dalai Lama
"Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin/As self-neglecting."
-William Shakespeare
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
Oscar Wilde
"You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish."
-Anita Brookner
"In the shadow-draped room, my small boy self rocked his head back and forth. Psychologists and self-help gurus speak of the love of self, proselytizing that: you cannot truly find another's love unless you have first discovered your own. All my life until then, I had not cared one iota about myself. The truth is that I hardly even liked me......"
Barry Windsor-Smith
OPUS Vol II
"Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when the right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing."
-Germaine Greer Times London 1 feb. 1986
"The persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is."
-Carl Jung
"I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell."
Rollo May
"The moment that any life, however good, stifles you, you may be sure it isn't your real life."
-Arthur Christopher Benson
"Insist on yourself; never imitate."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself determines, or rather indicates his fate."
Thoreau
"One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star."
-G.K. Chesterton
"My self....is a dramatic ensemble. Here a prophetic ancestor makes his appearance. Here a brutal hero shouts. Here an alcoholic bon vivant argues with a learned professor. Here a lyric muse, chronically lovestruck, raises her eyes to heaven. Her papa steps forward, uttering pedantic protests. Here the indulgent uncle intercedes. Here the aunt babbles gossip. Here the maid giggles lasciviously. And I look upon it all with amazement. the sharpened pen in my left hand."
-Paul Klee
The Diaries of Paul Klee
"You never find yourself until you face the truth."
-Pearl Bailey
"Sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say yes to ourselves, that peace enters into us whole, that self-hate and self-contempt disappear, and that our self is reunited with itself. Then we can say that grace has come upon us."
-Paul Tillich
"How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for."
-Goethe
"Above all things, reverence yourself."
-Pythagoras
"The true value of human beings can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self."
Albert Einstein
"We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self."
-Cyril Connolly
The Unquiet Grave
"The self is the modern substitute for the soul."
-Allan Bloom
"Beware of no Man more than thy self."
-Thomas Fuller
"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that inner string."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In running away from ourselves,
we either fall on our neighbor's shoulders
or fly at this throat."
-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
"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."
-Mary McCarthy (1912-89)
Writers at Work (Second Series, ed. by George Plimton, 1963)
"Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift....The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae."
-Camille Paglia
Sex, Art, and American Culture
"The most important event in the life of a man is the moment when he becomes conscious of his own ego."
-Tolstoi
"Man is fearful of things which cannot hurt him and he knows it; and he longs for things which can be of no good to him and he knows it, but in truth it is something in man himself of which he is afraid and it is something in man himself for which he longs."
-Rabbi Nachman
"You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality."
-Florida Scott-maxwell
"This above all: to thine own self be true."
-Shakespeare
"Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Can one thus resume one's self? Can one know one's self? Is one ever somebody? I don't know anything about it any more. It now seems to me that one changes from day to day and that every few years one becomes a new being."
-George Sand
The Intimate Journal of George Sand
"It is returning, at last it is coming home to me-my own Self and those parts of it that have long been abroad and scattered among all things and accidents."
-Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"That which, from the earliest times to the present moment, men have found so hard to understand is their ignorance of themselves! Not only in regard to good and evil, but in regard to what is much more essential! The primeval delusion still lives on that one knows, and knows quite precisely in ever case, how human action is brought about....Actions are never what they appear to us to be! We have expended so much labour on learning that external things are not as they appear to us to be-very well! The case is the same with the inner world! ...So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves, for us the the law 'Each is furthest from himself' applies to all eternity-we are not 'men of knowledge' with respect to ourselves."
-Nietzsche
"True happiness consists in eliminating the false idea of "I."
The Buddha
"He who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself."
Oscar Wilde
"The humble knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God than the deepest search of science."
-Thomas a Kempis
Imitation of Christ
Resolve to find thyself and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery"
-Matthew Arnold "Self-Dependence"
"Nobody doubts he exists, though he may doubt the existence of God. If he finds out the truth about himself and discovers his own source, this is all that is required."
Ramana Maharishi
"The very discovery of these hidden things is in itself a purifying experience! The soul needs to discover what is inside. The self nature needs to see what it really is, and what it is like-right to the very bottom."
-Jeanne Guyon
"Me, what's that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off, I begin, and vice versa."
Russell Hoban
Turtle Diary
"Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding our selves."
-Henry Miller
The World of Sex
"I have always disliked myself at any given moment; the total of such moments is my life."
-Cyril Connolly
"I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor."
-Leo Tolstoy
"Which is your true self, the self of yesterday, that of today, or that of tomorrow.....for whose preservation you clamor?"
-The Buddha
"Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation says "I" And in each case it seems to be taken for granted that this I belongs to the Whole, to the whole man, and that a thought, a desire, or an aversions is expressed by this Whole."
P.D. Ourspensky
"All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self....What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself-a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required....I am a theater and nothing more than a theater."
Philip Roth
The Counterlife
"Whoso would be a (wo)man, must be a nonconformist. (S)He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world."
Emerson "Self-Reliance"
"To study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things."
Zen Master Dogen (1350 C.E.)
"We loosely talk of Self-realization, for lack of a better term. But how can one realize or make real that which alone is real? All we need to do is to give up our habit of regarding as real that which is unreal. All religious practices are meant solely to help us do this. When we stop regarding the unreal as real, then reality alone will remain, and we will be that."
Ramana Maharishi
"Not only does the wind of chance events shake me about as it lists, but I also shake and disturb myself by the instability of my stance: anyone who turns his prime attention on to himself will hardly ever find himself in the same state twice. I give my soul this face or that, depending upon which side I lay it down on. I speak about myself in diverse ways: that is because I look at myself in diverse ways. Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending on some twist or attribute: timid, insolent; chaste, lecherous; talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull, brooding, affable, lying, truthful, learned, ignorant; generous, miserly and then prodigal-I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgment this whirring about and this discordance. There is nothing I can say about myself as a whole simply and completely, without intermingling and admixture."
-Montaigne
"I sloughed off my self as a snake sloughs off its skin. Then I looked into myself and saw that I am He."
Abu Yazid Al-Bistami (?-874 C.E.)
Sufi mystic
"But you.....yourself can create your own world."
Henry Miller
"The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self."
-Novalis
"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates."
-Thomas Szasz
The Second Sin
"Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others."
-Dostoyevsky
""Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions."
-Joan Didion
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
"It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world."
-Lucille Ball
"It is easy-terribly easy- to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that is to break a man's spirit is devil's work."
-George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"No longer am I waiting
For someone else
To take me out
Of that dark place
The self of you is the prime mover."
Louise Nevelson
"The noble soul has reverence for itself."
Nietzsche
"Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself."
-Virginia Woolf
A Room of One's Own
"The surest way to be deceived is to consider oneself cleverer than others."
-Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613-80)
"One’s own self is well hidden from one’s own self: of all mines of treasure, one’s own is the last to be dug up."
Nietzsche
"In every man's remembrances there are things he will not reveal to everybody, but only to his friends. There are other things he will not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and then only under a pledge of secrecy. Finally, there are some things that a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and any honest man accumulates a pretty fair number of such things. That is to say, the more respectable a man is, the more of them he has."
-Dostoevsky
"Respect yourself if you would have others respect you."
-Baltasar Gracian
"Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away."
-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve."
-Henry David Thoreau
"Our original shimmering self gets buried so deep we hardly live out of it at all....rather, we learn to live out of all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and casting off like coats and hats against the world's weather."
Frederick Buechner
Telling Secrets
"You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself."
Beryl Markham
"Allow the Sources of Being to maintain contact with you: ignore the impressions and opinions of your customary self. If this self were of value in your search, it would have found realization for you. But all it can do is to depend upon others."
Amin Suhrawardi
"The idea that we are separate and autonomous beings is not only mistaken but is a fundamental source of our suffering."
Wes Nisker
Buddha's Nature
"What I have now. I know that no army can take from me. I have myself."
-Michael J. Fox
"I am what survives me."
-Erik Erikson
"It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator-our very self-consciousness-is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution."
-Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
"The self that pervades the modern world at the close of the twentieth century is completely convinced of its own autonomy and separateness. Over time we have developed what psychological historian Philip Cushman calls "the bounded, masterful self," an individual who believes that he or she is completely independent of outside forces. This modern self lives in a "culture of narcissism," with very little sense of being part of either a grand cosmic design, the unfolding process of nature, or even a communal or historical destiny. In the mirror of our culture and in the mirror of our private bathrooms we see only the individual. Upon closer examination, this image begins to look like an hallucination: we seem to be suffering a new form of schizophrenia in which we label all of the different voices in our heads as "I" or "mine." Believing them all to be ours is as far-fetched as believing they all belong to the gods."
Wes Nisker
Buddha's Nature
"The behavior (or our genes) is designed to interfere with the happiness of others. If genes were capable of having emotions, (they) would say things like: "Happiness is making others unhappy".....(Their) strengths depend upon billions of years and selection for selfishness."
Lyall Watson
"The man who hates himself is unable to love anybody. The Christian commandment to 'love thy neighbor as thyself', rests on the premise of self-love, which is realistic, and proposes that we extend to others, and , in the end, to everyone, the love we feel for ourselves. The problem is that loving everyone equally is the same as loving no one. Distributing love in a rigorously egalitarian fashion would mean destroying it. Whosoever says that he loves his neighbor as himself is either not thinking what he is saying, or is lying-he eats and sleeps regularly while there are hungry people round the corner."
Eduardo Giannetti
Lies We Live By: The Art of Self-Deception
"If you are ready for some radical-and possibly disturbing-self-knowledge, you might undertake an assessment of your LQ-love quotient. How much does the desire to be a more loving person figure in your life? How wide or narrow is the circle of those you love? How many of your daily activities are suffused with feelings of love? Which of the many varieties of love do you practice? (For suggestions, consult "Love" in Roget's Thesaurus)
Sam Keen
Hymns To an Unknown God
"One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead."
Oscar Wilde
"We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we end by disguising ourselves from ourselves."
-Duc de La Rochefoucauld
"You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself."
-Beryl Markham
"Although there's a person we know all about
Still bearing our name and loving himself as before.
That person has become a fiction; our true existence
Is decided by no one and has no importance to love."
W.H. Auden
"For the Time Being a Christmas Oratorio"
"Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced."
Hugo Von Hofmannsthal
"Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable."
-R. Buckminster Fuller
"Each relationship you have with another person reflects the relationship you have with yourself."
-Alice Deville
"Man is a texture made up of many threads, an onion made up of a hundred integuments. The ancients knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of personality."
-Herman Hesse Steppenwolf
"I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing.
All alone it stood and the moss hung down from the branches.
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
and its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself...."
-Walt Whitman, i saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
"Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh."
Valery
"We have to serve our self many years before we gain our own confidence."
Henry Haskins
"He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra
"Of Self-overcoming"
"....you find that instead of becoming weak, crushed, empty (as might have been expected) you gain a new strength and wholeness which you realize is the only real strength and wholeness. You achieve a knowledge that is the only real knowledge, a freedom and happiness that alone truly deserves these names. By non-action-that is, by abandoning the aggressive self-assertion that alone seems effective action to others-you find that in reality you are accomplishing all the ends that are worth accomplishing."
Dr. Edwin A Burtt
Man Seeks the Divine
"Self-control is the very core of the Vedantic discipline; without it no progress is possible in spiritual life, nor any success in meditation. Self-control means the development of will power and also the strengthening of the determinative faculty, which controls all the sense-organs."
Swami Nikhilananda Atmabodha, Self-Knowledge
"Sometimes it seems as if I am condemned to solitary confinement within the prison of my ego. year after year, this tough ego survives underneath the pleasant mask of my personality. Look at me: I smile and have polite manners, but that is all a facade-a Potemkin village. Below the surface of my persona, I have hidden fortifications, a thousand defense mechanisms, a fortress. My self-importance, superiority, arrogance, and habit of judging others form walls that keep me safe. i am not like "them," I tell myself. I'm better, more cultured, work harder, have better morals. i dream of conquest, winning, vindictive triumph, being number one.
Secretly, I approach every situation in a calculating manner. What's in it for me? Do I stand to gain or lose power, prestige, time, energy, money? How can I turn this situation to my advantage? Who are my enemies and potential allies? Jean-Paul Sartre was right: "hell is other people." Life is a battle in which we are either conquerors or conquered. Other people are either potential threats or useful objects. If they are more beautiful, powerful, smarter, or wealthy, I envy and fear them and find some way to flatter them and cut them down to my size. if they are inferior, I secretly despise them and use them for my purposes."
In the twisted recesses of our psyches, we all feel and act like this: ordinary people no less than famous politicians, actors, talk-show hosts, and athletes. The ego-war is everywhere, in high places and low. Observe the superstar evangelists, priests, ministers, healers, gurus, and "holy" men and women, and you will find even they compete for titles-the most saintly, the most wise, the most enlightened, the most free of ego."
Sam Keen
hymns to an Unknown God
"A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong....Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Only those qualities that result from our spontaneous activity give strength to the self and thereby form the basis of its integrity. The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness. Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours."
Erich Fromm
Escape From Freedom
"Love of detachment," on the other hand, is free from all demanding ness, all need to control the loved one, all dependence upon him. It is detached, not in the sense of with-drawing from emotional concern for others, but in the sense of gladly accepting them as they are, not requiring them to be different from their present selves as the price on one's friendly affection. it is detached, not from caring for others, but from preoccupation with oneself, and from the need to make others serve the cravings of the self. It is the compassionate giving of oneself to the world without asking for anything in return..."
Edwin A Burtt
Man Seeks the Divine
"Our task, then, is to strengthen our consciousness of ourselves, to find centers of strength within ourselves which will enable us to stand despite the confusion and bewilderment around us."
Rollo May
Man's Search for Himself
"Self-esteem isn't everything, It's just that there's nothing without it."
-Gloria Steinem
"Our natural view of our mental state is deeply distorted....the oneness we feel is an illusion....we are not the same person from day to day or moment to moment. Our mind contains a special system, hidden from our view, that quietly preserves the illusion of unity."
-Dr. Robert Ornstein
The Evolution of Consciousness
"Now another avenue is open towards his goal. It comes from inside themselves, not with moral commands but with creative power. It is really their better Self....The most amazing thing is that this new and unheard-of power is as the same time well-known and familiar to them. They have felt, thought, dreamt all this many times. Only they were never able to express it clearly enough.....And then the most unexpected thing happens: a new clarity and certainty, and a new and deeper consciousness are there; the real Self and its creative forces begin the new work....it proves that there is a way...."
Fritz Kunkel
In Search of Maturity
"A person is never himself but always a mask; a person never owns his own person, but always represents another, by whom he is possessed. And the other that one is, is always ancestors."
Norman O. Brown
Love's Body
"Let him raise the self by the Self and not let the self become depressed; for verily is the Self the friend of the self, and also the Self the self's enemy; The Self is the friend of the self of him in whom the self by the Self is vanquished; but to the unsubdued self the Self verily becometh hostile as an enemy."
(Scriptures of India)
from "A Summary of Important Science of Mind Principles"
"Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that no one could be considered a success until they had survived the betrayal of someone they loved and trusted.
I disagree. I think authentic success is something much, much more: surviving the betrayal of someone you loathed and tormented. yourself.
and how do you do that? by stopping it, that's how, just stopping it. Today. by praying right this moment for the courage to learn how to transform the self-loathing into self-loving every day through your passionate choices.
by now you realize that Something More is not money, or fame, a home featured in Architectural digest, or a love affair with a movie star.
Something More is repose of the soul. Something More is self-worth.
Something More is self-knowledge. the knowledge that your passion is holy and that the only way you'll be able to live authentically is to be true to your passions.
But the only way you or I can be true to our passions is to swear never, ever to betray ourselves again.
because Something More is the certainty that no on in the world can betray me except me. Other people, those I love and trust can and will disappoint me, fail me, and hurt me, because they are human. I will disappoint, fail, and hurt those I love because I am human. human beings disappoint, fail, and hurt each other, even those we love with all our hearts.
but no one else in the world can betray me.
thank heaven. I wouldn't want it any other way. Neither should you.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
Something Moe: Excavating your Authentic Self
"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard taskmaster to yourself-and be lenient with everybody else."
-Henry Ward Beecher
"Loathing is grief that has festered; the rampant infection of self-pity. To loathe something or someone is "to detest" with just enough disgust and intolerance to make the feeling the emotional equivalent of roiling rot. This is what self-loathing is although we never call it that. It's easier and safer to tell ourselves and others, "Oh, I'm a bit hard on myself."
How do we loathe ourselves? Let me count the ways. Reasons that have nothing to do with our appearance, age, or weight. some of the world's most famous beauties can't stand the sight of themselves. Self-loathing is an equal-opportunity oppressor."
-Sarah Ban Breathnach
Something More: Excavating Your authentic Self
"The ingenuity of self-deception is inexhaustible."
Hannah Moore 1811
"She succeeded in getting other people into armchairs....with nothing left for herself but something small and spiky in a corner."
-Phyllis Bottome (1934)
"WE live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Those who do everything for their own sake alone practice selfishness, which is the greatest of evils, which produces unsociability, want of fellowship, unfriendliness, injustice, impiety, for nature has made man not like those beasts which love solitude, but like the gregarious beasts which live together like the most sociable of all creatures, that he may live not to himself alone, but also to his father, and to his mother, and to his brethren, and to his wife, and to his children, and to all his other relations and friends, and to those of the same borough as himself, and to those of the same tribe, and to his native country, and to his fellow countrymen, and to all mankind, and moreover to the different parts of the universe, and to the whole world, and much more to the Father and Creator of the world, for he must be (if at least he is really endowed with reason) sociable, loving the world, and loving God, that he may also be beloved by God."
Philo of Alexander
"The symptoms of self-centered frustration are the same, whether in Sally and Sam in a home or in Sukarno on his island throne, ruling over a hundred million people-the symptoms are the same and they are these: "I am what I am because you are what you are. If you were different I would be different. It is all your fault." The self-centered blame their problems on others. The self at the center is off-center and hence the recurring problems, individual and collective.
This is the center of the diseases of humanity-the self out of place. All else is symptom-this is the disease. Quacks treat symptoms, doctors treat diseases.
Will the Christian faith turn out to be a quack, treating the symptoms of individual and world diseases? Or will it turn out to be a physician-the great physician, putting His finger on the spot, the sore spot of the world's problems? And will that touch be healing?"
E. Stanley Jones
Victory Through Surrender
"When you have found yourself you can have knowledge. Until then you can only have opinions. Opinions are based on habit and what you conceive to be convenient to you.
The study of the Way requires self-encounter along the way. You have not met yourself yet. The only advantage of meeting others in the meantime is that one of them may present you to yourself.
Before you do that, you will possibly imagine that you have met yourself many times. But the truth is that when you do meet yourself, you come into a permanent endowment and bequest of knowledge that is like no other experiences on earth."
Tariqavi
from Wisdom of the Idiots by Idries Shah
"For one thing, the False Self tries to make you feel guilty and disloyal at the thought of abandoning it. Also, it makes full use of man's mental laziness. It slyly whispers the greatest lie of all-that no state really exists other than its own miserable one. This is its chief weapon of terror-to hint that your plunge away from the False Self is a plunge toward a terrifying nothingness. But the truth is, this new nothingness turns out to be a world of fantastic light and freedom.
"While the False Self is causing all this commotion, what is the True Self doing?"
Tariqavi
"Gently trying to get you to listen to the truth that you are free and always have been. It urges you to see that you are not a slave to the illusions whispered by the False Self. It tells you that the False Self is bluffing, and that you have power to call that bluff. Remember, the True Self is the voice of Truth."
Vernon Howard
"But how is it that we expect to catch up with our envisioned selves? Really, the whole thing is impossible from the start. Think about it. In the first place, this envisioned self we pant after is not out there. It resides, if it can be said to reside anywhere, in our imagination as a vital but volatile element of the available self; for that very reason it exists in a whirlwind of change, redefinition, and instability. The congruence we seek-the matching up of some self that exists now with some self that exists off somewhere in an ideal future-is an illusion, albeit an immensely popular one.
Brian J. Mahan
Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose
"at whatever cost and under whatever circumstances people have succeeded in finding themselves....to find oneself is to have been stumbling about in a dark wood and to have encountered there, unexpectedly and yet how welcomely, a second self, capable of leading one out into the safety of a sunny upland meadow.....for we, too, at different stages of the same journey, have our dark woods to transverse and our sunny meadows to attain. if the hour happens to be later than we may have wished, take heart! So much more to be cherished is the bloom."
-Brendan Gill Late Bloomers
"The inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters, a professional one, a national one, a civic one, a class one, a geographic one, a sex one, a conscious, an unconscious and perhaps even a private one, he combines them all in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a little channel washed out by all these trickling streams."
-Robert Musil
"There is no whole self. It suffices to walk any distance along the inexorable rigidity that the mirrors of the past open to us in order to feel like outsiders, naively flustered by our own bygone days. There is no community of intention in them, nor are they propelled by the same breeze. This has been declared by those men who have truly scrutinized the calendars from which time was discarding them. "
Jorge Luis Borges
"The Nothingness of Personality"
Selected Non-Fictions
"In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open, except yourself."
J. Krishnamurti
"The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself. They are at home in the hearth of your soul."
-John O' Donohue
"God and I in space alone
And nobody else in view.
:And where are the people, O Lord?" I said.
"The earth below and the sky o'erhead
And the dead whom once I knew?"
"That was a dream," God smiled and said,
"A dream that seemed to be true,
There were no people, living or dead.
There was no earth and no sky o'erhead
There was only myself-and you,"
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox, "Illusion"
"Socrates was once gossiping with some friends about an Athenian who was about to take a voyage. "Will he learn much from his trip?" asked one friend. "Unlikely," replied Socrates. "He's taking himself along." Twenty-four hundred years later, the words still bite deep. Real learning is not, like foraging or money-making, a simple matter of acquisition. It is rather a process in which new experience that encounters is reciprocated by inner change in oneself. This inner change, this growth, is difficult, if not impossible, if one "takes oneself along," that is, if one confronts every new situation with an armored identity, imposing a familiar perspective on unfamiliar events. This assertive attitude, this obsessive self, is like some government censor blocking any ideas or data that might provoke rebellion. Instead one must be ready to lose the self, or to have a sense of self so flexible and yielding that it poses no threat to the new. This flexible self is not a weak self; it is a stronger, more youthful, more human identity, open to the outrageous variety of experience and the profound surprises of change."
Robert Grudin
On Dialogue
"Start suspecting that those anxious thoughts and feelings you catch trying to sell you an umbrella are not there to shelter you from some approaching storm....but that their sole purpose is to lure you into one."
Guy Finley
The Secret Way of Wonder
"Meantime, the notion of a self-a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior-a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds-this old-fashioned notion (what's a bootstrap, for God's sake?) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away.....slipping away.....The peculiarly American faith in the power of the individual to transform himself from a helpless cipher into a giant among men, a faith that ran from Emerson ("Self-Reliance") to Horatio Alger's luck and pluck stories to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking to Og Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the World-that faith is now as moribund as the god for whom Nietzsche wrote an obituary in 1882. It lives on today only in the decrepit form of the "motivational talk," as lecture agents refer to it, given by retired football stars such as Fran Tarkenton to audiences of businessmen, most of the woulda-been athletes (like the author of this article), about how life is like a football game. "It's late in the fourth period and you're down by thirteen points and the Cowboys got you hemmed in on your own one-yard line and its third and twenty three. Whaddaya do?...."
Sorry, Fran, but it's third and twenty-three and the genetic fix is in, and the new message is now being pumped out into the popular press and onto television at a stupefying rate. Who are the pumps? They are a new breed who call themselves "evolutionary psychologists." You can be sure that twenty years ago the same people would have been calling themselves Freudian; but today they are genetic determinists, and the press has a voracious appetite for whatever they come up with."
Tom Wolfe
Hooking UP
"....A man abandons himself as he was and as he knew himself to be, and, by emptying himself, finds a new self. Jesus' eschatological saying tells us that 'Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it.' Modern anthropology has made this the basic principle by which man becomes human, in accordance with the couplet in Schiller's Reiterlied:
'Unless you place your life at stake,
your life you will never win.'
-Jurgen Moltmann
The Crucified God
"Forsake thyself, resign thyself and thou shalt enjoy much inward peace. Give all for all; seek nothing and ask back nothing; abide purely and with firm confidence in me; thou shalt be free in heart, and darkness shall not overwhelm thee."
-Thomas a kempis
"The essential work of man is to remember the Self."
-Joseph Needleman
"but the discovery of talent is only one side, perhaps the easier side, of self-development. The other side is self-knowledge. The maxim "Know thyself"-so ancient.....so deceptively simple.....so difficult to follow-has gained in richness of meaning as we learn more about man's nature. Even today the wisest of men have some inkling of all that is implied in that gnomic saying. Research in psychology and psychiatry has shown the extent to which mental health is bound up in a reasonably objective view of the self, in accessibility of the self to consciousness, and in acceptance of the self. Erikson has helped us to understand how crucial and how perilous is the young person's search for identity."
-John W. Gardner
Self-Renewal
"The body is wiser than its inhabitant. The body is the soul. We ignore its aches, its pains, its eruptions, because we fear the truth. The body is God's messenger."
-Erica Jong
"it is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too."
-Josh Billings
"We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others. The difficulty of this commandment lies in the paradox that it would have us love ourselves unselfishly; because even our love of ourselves is something we owe others.
What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean, first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.
But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be "as gods." We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another. Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and "one body," will begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives."
-Thomas Merton
No Man Is An Island
"This pathway to virtue, however, lies not in a scholastic investigation of man's place in the natural order of things but in an introspective examination of the individual self. This examination, at least in My Secret is achieved through an inner, imaginary dialogue with a spiritual mentor, in this case a friend that Petrarch knew only from books but in Petrarch's mind a friend nonetheless. The self is thus understood not immediately but through dialogue or discussion. Self-knowledge thus comes about through seeing oneself through the eyes of another, but another who is also in some sense another self. As Petrarch later remarks in the remedies, such talk "will discover you unto yourself, who seeing all things, sees not yourself. The purpose of such a discovery is not merely self-understanding but self-improvement and self-perfection."
-Michael Allen Gillespie
The Theological Origins of Modernity
"When you learn to love and to let yourself be loved, you come home to the hearth of your own spirit. you are warm and sheltered. you are completely at one in the house of your own longing and belonging."
-John O'Donohue
Perhaps one of the most remarkable sayings about the self in the Scriptures of India is the following: "Let him raise the self by the Self and not the self become depressed; for verily is the Self the friend of the self, and also the Self the self's enemy; The Self is the friend of the self of him in whom the self by the Self is vanquished; but to to the unsubdued self the Self verily becomes hostile as an enemy." This, of course, refers to the deathless Self, the incarnation of God in us.
"He who knows himself has come to know his Lord...." This refers to the complete unity of the Spirit, or, as Jesus said, "I and the Father are one" "And he who thus hath learned to know himself, hath reached that God which doth transcend abundance...."
Ernest Holmes
A Science of Religion and a Religion of Science
"Not only does the psyche exist, but it is existence itself. It is an almost absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical....We might well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter in so far as we perceive psychic images mediated by the senses."
-Carl Jung
""You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself."
-Beryl Markham
"Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems. We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don't want to know ourselves, don't want to depend on ourselves, don't want to live with ourselves. by middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.
A long time ago George Herbert said: By all means use some times to be alone.
Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear.
That is good self-renewal doctrine. The individual who has become a stranger to himself has lost the capacity for genuine self-renewal. he can no longer return for sustenance to the springs of his own being."
John W. Gardner
Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't mater and those who matter don't mind."
-Dr. Seuss
"Self-improvement is the greatest hobby in the world. It is also the oldest human activity, for it was self-improvement that made us human in the first place.
The object of all self-improvement practices is to increase the practitioner's happiness, power and well-being-to expand the things that work for you, not to find out what is wrong with you. In this book we emphasize solutions.
Self-improvement is the goal of all religions, all philosophies, all therapies. it is the goal of sports, yoga and holistic health techniques. it is the goal of education. it is also the goal of medicine, science and technology. The evolution of self-improvement has always paralleled the evolution of human consciousness."
-Jim Leonard & Phil Laut Rebirthing: The Science of Enjoying All of your Life
"If there is any higher virtue than humility, we do not know what it is."
ibid
"By the way, the safest thing in the world to procrastinate is humbling yourself. Rest assured that if you put it off long enough the Universe will do the job for you!"
ibid
"In the modern concept....there is no possibility of a detached, self-contained existence."
-A.N. Whitehead
"The conquest of self is in a sense the inevitable consequence of true self-knowledge. If the self-centered self is shattered by a genuine awareness of its situation, there is the power of a new life in the experience."
-Niebuhr
"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit."
-ee cummings
"Save all yourself for the wedding though nobody knows when or if it will come."
-Carlos Drummond de Andrade
*************************************
Book:" Sources of the Self" by Charles Taylor
Book: "The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head" by Raymond Tallis*
Book: "The Commanding Self" by Idries Shaw
Book: "The Intimate Self: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism" by Ashis Nandy
Book: "The Inescapable Self" by Timothy Chappell
Book: "The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization" by A.H. Almaas
Book: "The Bounds Of Agency: An Essay in Reversionary Metaphysics" by Carol Rovane
Book: "The Courage To Be: Second Edition" by Paul Tillich
Book: "The Intimate Enemy" by Guy Finley
Book: "Honoring the Self" by Nathaniel Branden
Book: "Self Matters" by Phillip C. McGraw, Ph.D
Book: "The Book" by Alan Watts
Book: "Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yu and its legacy" by Nanxiu Qian
Book: "Modernity's Wager: Authority, the Self, and Transcendence" by Adam B. Seligman
Book: "How do we know who we are? A Biography of the Self." by Arnold M. Ludwig
Book: "BLISS: Writing to Find Your True Self" by Katherine Ramsland
Book: "The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self." by P. La Cerra & R. Bingham
Book: "The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Adal al-din Kashania" by William C. Chitick
Book: "Reality Check: What your Mind Knows, But Isn't Telling You" by David L. Weiner
Book: "The Inescapable Self" by Timothy Chappell
Book: "Institutional Selves: Troubled identities in a Postmodern World" Ed. by J.F. Gubrium & J.A. Holstein