Self-consciousness is hell.

In her 20′s, a woman’s breasts double her self-esteem. In her 40′s, they halve it.

Doubt has become the veritable wellspring of my creative process and my philosophic explorations. It has equipped me with the temerity and wherewithal to question certain truths deemed ‘fundamental’ by my betters. Defiance has made...

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just...

What does introspection mean? It means you’re looking in the wrong direction.

High heels are a short (theist) woman’s (subconscious) way of telling God to go to hell … in public.

One of the reasons we judge each other so harshly in this world of parenting is because… we perceive anyone else who’s doing anything differently than what we’re doing as criticizing our choices.

My waist is a 30. The jeans are a 28. When I fart, the Reeboks blow off.

Quite possibly, the purpose of the universe is to provide a congenial home for self-conscious creatures who can ask profound questions and who can probe the nature of the universe itself.

A face-lift is a woman’s attempt to lower the odds of the next person accurately guessing her age.

I suddenly realize that I’m naked, which shouldn’t bother me since it’s the phone, but for some reason it does. “How’s it hanging?” Kyra asks and now I think I’m blushing. It’s just an expression,...

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language,...

The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and...

To flatter a young man, tell him that you thought that he was older than he is. To flatter an old woman, tell her that you thought that she was younger than she is.

I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a...

People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet.

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on...

*Live fast, die young, and, leave a good looking corpse.* is dumb. When dead, looks matters not. (Furthermore, the corpse will only look good for a day, or, twelve.)

Students of public speaking continually ask, “How can I overcomeself-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before anaudience?”Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that somehorses feed near the track and never...

Self-consciousness kills communication.

The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another – that a coherent matrix has been prepared...

Primary purposes of a mirror: (1) To help civilized men realize their imperfections, and, (2) To help the imperfect hide their imperfections.

If I had a reader and he had read all I have written so far of my adventures, there would be certainly no need to inform him that I am not created for any sort...

Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too...

Self-consciousness isn’t just A curse. It is part of THE curse.

A push-up bra is to a woman’s chest … what ‘breathing-in’ is to a man’s stomach.

Well, it all comes to this, there’s no use trying to live in other people’s opinions. The only thing to do is to live in our own.

She tries to maintain a nondescript exterior; she learns the sideways glance instead of looking at people directly. She speaks in practised, precise sentences so that she is not misunderstood. She chooses her words carefully,...

Nobody can say anything about you. Whatsoever people say is about themselves. But you become very shaky, because you are still clinging to a false center. That false center depends on others, so you are...

Teddy was feeling as miserable and impotently angry as any male creature does when two women are quarreling about him in his presence. He wished himself a thousand miles away.

One-night stands were invented to free men from worrying about the size of their penis. And to free women from worrying about the size of their stretch marks.

When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don’t know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.

‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror?…The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the...

To come across as younger than they are: Women buy creams that promise to slow aging; men buy fast cars.

It was a relief to inhabit someone else’s life for a while, to get her personal issues for a brief respite. In a play, she knew exactly how all her character’s problems would be resolved....

Self-conciousness is the enemy of all creativity.

Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else.

A gold tooth is to some blacks, what braces are to all whites.

And down I went to fetch my bride:But, Alice, you were ill at ease;This dress and that by turns you tried,Too fearful that you should not please.I loved you better for your fears,I knew you...

What one should add here is that self-consciousness is itself unconscious: we are not aware of the point of our self-consciousness. If ever there was a critic of the fetishizing effect of fascinating and dazzling...