Self Quotes - Page 430

Skill to do comes of doing.

Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.

To maintain an opinion because it is thine, and not because it is true, is to prefer thyself above the truth.

Even the Atheists... readily acknowledge it for an indubitable truth, that there must be something... which was never made or produced - and which therefore is the cause of those other things that are made, something... whose existence must needs be necessary... Wherefore all the question now is, what is this... self-existent thing, which is the cause of all other things that are made.

Through meditation one discovers one's own light. That light you can call your soul, your self, your God—whatsoever word you choose—or you can remain just silent because it has no name. It is a nameless experience, tremendously beautiful, ecstatic, utterly silent, but it gives you the taste of eternity, of timelessness, of something beyond death.

In love, for example - the so-called love - we are 'related.' We appear to be related. We create the fallacy of a relationship, but in fact we are just deceiving ourselves. The two will remain two. Howsoever near, the two will remain two. Even in sexual communion they will be two. This two-ness, this duality will never last. So a relationship is only creating a fallacious oneness. It is not there. Oneness can never exist between two selves. Oneness can only exist between two no-selves.

"The first awareness of the child comes with his ego. He becomes aware of the "I", not of the Self. Really, he becomes aware first of the "thou". The child first becomes aware of his mother. Then, reflectively, he becomes aware of himself. First he becomes aware of objects around him. Then, by and by, he begins to feel that he is separate. This feeling of separation gives the feeling of ego, and because the child first becomes aware of the ego, ego becomes a covering on the Self. "

The world is against individuality. It is against your being just your natural self. It wants you just to be a robot, and because you have agreed to be a robot you are in trouble. You are not a robot.

In every decade rock and roll starts to get very serious and navel gazing and kind of self serious and every once and a while it kind of needs a kick in the pants.

Sometimes we just need a space that gives us permission to be the best, most full version of our artistic selves, and we flourish.

I refuse to believe that the processed beauty that I see around me is what I have to be.

Stop thinking that other people are going to come and save you. You gotta save yourself.

We can use wealth, intelligence, education or health in harmony with our compassionate spiritual nature, or we can use them according to the selfish concerns of our particular egos. We have choices as human beings. We can be saints or we can be terrorists. We can be peaceful or we can be miserable. When we see everything in the world as God's sacred property, then we're seeing the spiritual potential, the spiritual substance, everywhere.

Be true to yourself and go with your instincts - don't be somebody you're not just to fit in.

I am really focused on how I can improve myself and the world around me.

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in the varied forms of self-realization.

Religion, like poetry, is not a mere idea, it is expression. The self-expression of God is in the endless variety of creation; and our attitude toward the Infinite Being must also in its expression have a variety of individuality ceaseless and unendi.

By a kind of happy pre-established harmony, such as a later age discovered between the needs of society and the self-interest of the individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of spiritual grace, for it is a proof that a man has laboured faithfully in his vocation.

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete.

I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.

It's easy for me to say, "Oh yeah, that's the self-saboteur move that most artists pull whenever they're afraid."

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

By its very nature, hard-line ideology is self-serving and self-perpetuating; its primary goal is to survive - and that precludes everything.