My confidence is in the idea that I may be wrong on this or that. No man in this life should ever have to bear the burden of perfection.

To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other...

One should love oneself enough not to love oneself too much.

I see you have returned, my love; and your mood is as dark as ever. Did your soldiers not adore you to your complete satisfaction?

We are to give (and take) true love without falling into the narcissistic habit of only trying to take it in.

true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing

I am in love with you’, I responded.He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh.’Of course you are,’ he replied. ‘I understand perfectly because I’m in love with myself. The fact that I’m not transfixed...

The high road is littered with pot shots.

[Abusers] blame the world – circumstances, other people – for their defeats, misfortune, misconduct, and failures. The abuser firmly believes that his life is swayed by currents and persons over which he has no influence...

Love without humility results in the inclination to act as everyone’s parent, humility without love results in the need to be everyone’s child, and love with humility results in the desire to be a friend.

Narcissistic personality disorder is named for Narcissus, from Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection. Freud used the term to describe persons who were self-absorbed, and psychoanalysts have focused on the narcissist’s...

Know that…there’s plenty of food and of course popcorn on the dining-room table. Just…help yourself. If that runs out just let me know. Don’t panic. And there’s coffee, both caff and decaf, and soft drinks...

The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in, becoming narcissistic.

Reality. Sometimes it comes through foreign eyes; because if you don’t know any better, you can’t see the worse. Or vice versa.

English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or...

Arrogance is an illusion of superiority one perpetrates upon their self. Some may ultimately find their way through the illusion, but only after many losses.

This conversation with myself has an overwhelming aroma of narcissism.

The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.

As if it wouldn’t rain without you…

I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative,...

You don’t know how shallow you are, or how narcissistic, until you find yourself in danger of acquiring a facial scar.”On the plus side, it’s so situated as potentially to make me look tough and...

Reality. It is sometimes brought through foreign eyes; because if you do not know any better, you cannot see the worse. And vice versa.

Love without sacrifice is like theft

If you’re going to be a narcissistic schmuck, kid, don’t bother studying Faulkner. Go straight to Brett Easton Ellis. He’s the role model you need.

When sex and money are fused in the service of exploitation, the two create an even more destructive form of rage of a type often exhibited in narcissistic and potentially psychopathic populations.

zoom lens effect,” in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband’s. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn’t have bothered anyone, but...

This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time,...

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”[Modernism’s Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]

What if the preacher or father’s saying ‘Someone here’s lost and hopeless’ was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers that...

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears

I bet it gets pretty lonely with only your ego for company.

What I’m primarily saying,’ he says, ‘is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response....

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn’t say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

The pain of the narcissist is that, to him, everything is really a threat. What doesn’t surrender in reverence is blasphemous to a high opinion of oneself – the burden of self-importance. The narcissist reconstructs...

His fame as an artist requires very tender care. Look what a mask of diplomacy is painstakingly formed by the whole of that fine profile; he is as wily as a cardinal. He has scented...

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid’s movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the...

This story [“The Depressed Person”] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It’s about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on...

The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear is just death

These illustrations suggest four general maxims[…]. The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don’t over-estimate your own merits. The third is: don’t...

A sociopath is one who sees others as impersonal objects to be manipulated to fulfill their own narcissistic needs without any regard for the hurtful consequences of their selfish actions.

Where everyone wants to be a leader, it makes one a follower to want to be a leader, and a leader to know what to follow.

But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern