Self Quotes - Page 92

Your ultimate goal in life is to become your best self. Your immediate goal is to get on the path that will lead you there.

Meditation is not a selfish thing. Even though you're diving in and experiencing the Self, you're not closing yourself off from the world. You're strengthening yourself, so that you can be more effective when you go back into the world.

Courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity.

I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.

...and there I suddenly found my articulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things. And that's when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor?

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.

Self-centered indulgence, pride and a lack of shame over sin are now emblems of the American lifestyle.

Freedom is knowing who you really are.

One of the greatest thrills in all of life is to feel the hand of God working through you and to be a part of the working reality of the church engaged in a movement larger than self.

Let others know when they have hurt or angered you. By not speaking up when someone insults or mistreats you, you are inadvertently giving permission for him or her to continue to treat you in the same way in the future.

So, the path of the co-creator is to be awakened spiritually within, which then turns into your own deeper life purpose, which then makes you want to reach out and touch others in a way that expresses self and really evolves our communities and our world. Certainly, we can't do that unless we activate ourselves first. That's why, for me, emergence is the shift from ego to essence. That is so important.

There are friendships merely for pleasure, some for the exchange of ideas. Rarest are those friends of one's inmost self.

How you start is important, very important, but in the end it is how you finish that counts. It is easier to be a self-starter than a self-finisher. The victor in the race is not the one who dashes off swiftest but the one who leads at the finish. In the race for success, speed is less important than stamina. The sticker outlasts the sprinter in life's race. In America we breed many hares but not so many tortoises.

Good moral character is not something that we can achieve on our own. We need a culture that supports the conditions under which self-love and friendship flourish.

I would be too selfish if I said everyone should see my movies more than once. To say that would mean I'm just marketing my work!

Glory, built on selfish principles, is shame and guilt.

To fix your attention on the best is to surround yourself with the best, and to become the best.

I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize -- that's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize -- and you say to yourself "What the hell have I been doing all my life?!" That blasts you.

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.

Instead of looking outside of ourselves and counting potential enemies, fasting summons us to turn our glance inward, and to take the measure of our greatest challenge: the self, the ego, in our own eyes and as others see us.

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

There is nothing to do, just be. Do nothing. Be. No climbing mountains and sitting in caves. I do not even say "be yourself" since you do not know yourself. Just be.

Success, I would find out, is interior. It has to do with self-fulfillment and the joy of living.