Self Quotes - Page 375

Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

The commonest weakness of our race is our ability to rationalize our most selfish purposes.

Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.

I don't trust a man who talks about ethics when he is picking my pocket. But if he is acting in his own self-interest and says so, I have usually been able to work out some way to do business with him.

Major theme of the book ["Hotels of North America"], from my point of view: what is persona, what is self, in the digital sphere, and/or what is the effect of it on self in a prolonged interaction.

She felt so much emotionally, she would say, that a physical outlet - physical pain - was the only way to make her internal pain go away. It was the only way she could control it.

Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

It seems we are suffering from a very narrow and self serving reading of the Gospel right now.

You can't take up golf on a whim and find yourself competing against Tiger Woods in the Masters six months later.

The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure. God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture.

An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance.

Our everyday self is a narrow construct...Our total self is far broader, ultimately infinite. Actors who seem to be playing themselves are actually playing roles they have become so skillful at that they seem pure and natural...Much bad Acting is the result of being too close to the Actor's everyday self, confining him in its rigid mold.

To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption.

Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable.

Francis [Collins] keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific - really scientific - credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt.

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.

If you find yourself stuck in the middle there is only one way to go, forward.

Immune system will heal itself.

The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.

The purpose cannot be creating self-styled democracies, but rather encouraging steps that are conducive to establishing democratic rule at universal standards. Obviously, this would be a formidable journey

It seems to be a common denominator with a lot of comics, this low self-esteem thing.

Consciousness is not the ineluctable starting point for self-understanding because there is a difference between being conscious and understanding oneself as a conscious being. The difference is between being in a certain state and knowing oneself to be in a certain state.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.