Things that matter are not easy. Feelings of happiness are easy. Happiness is not. Flirting is easy. Love is not. Saying you’re friends is easy. Being friends is not.

G. I. Gurdieff, “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson”So-and-so-and-so-must-be; do-not-do-what-must-not-be. Mullah’s favorite saying. p. 598

It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you...

The self is constituted within a variety of arenas and in relation to multiple traditions. Self-hood, on this understanding, is both provisional and open-ended, and critically depends on the configuration of relationships between one’s own...

To the extent that we retain the critical attitudes and destructive elements we have incorporated into our own personalities, we remain undifferentiated from our parents throughout our lifetime.

To run with the wolf was to run in the shadows, the dark ray of life, survival and instinct. A fierceness that was both proud and lonely, a tearing, a howling, a hunger and thirst....

Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it renders everything asunder, the wall, and the bonds...

It’s a sort of a self-contained, quickly movable team that can go in to an emergency situation abroad, set up a communications, set up an operations center, do some of the initial investigative work.

I know many people who believe in God, and I expected to find Him on my way to the South Pole if he exists. My religious experiences were very different however, [only] involving myself, nature...

The question of what we are can only be answered by ourselves. We each decide what we are by the life choices we make. How we were made, who are parents are, where we are...

Se achar que não valho nada, serei nada. Deixarei que os outros falem, decidam, vivam por mim. Porém, se acreditar que apesar dos naturais limites e do medo todo eu mereço uma dose de coisas...

Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as...

If solitude feels painful, it’s only because we don’t know how to be alone.

In still moments by the sea life seems large-drawn and simple. It is there we can see into ourselves.

Your self…is other people, all the people you’re tied to, and it’s only a thread.

TeenagerMe—a teenager? If she suddenly stood, here, now, before me, would I need to treat her as near and dear, although she’s strange to me, and distant? Shed a tear, kiss her brow for the...

The source of wisdom and power, of love and beauty, is within ourselves, but not within our egos. It is within our consciousness. Indeed, its presence provides us with a conscious contrast which enables us...

Nature has gone to great lengths to hide our subconscious from ourselves. Why?

Everywhere I go, it’s me and me. Half of me living my life, the other half watching me live it.

The only thing you really have to prove is yourself.

For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there...

There is a realm in which miracles are possible and do take place. The door to this realm is the belief in all possibilities and YOU are the key.

You cannot be fair to others without first being fair to yourself.Know that a well-honed sense of justice is a measure of personal experience, and all experience is a measure of self.Know that the highest...

Well, I’m an Episcopalian priest who struggles with a little self-medication problem, and I have a 23-year-old son who’s gay, and a 16-year-old daughter who’s caught dealing pot.

I don’t know what understanding myself is. I don’t look inside.I don’t believe I exist behind myself.

Write it on your heart you are the most beautiful soul of the Universe. Realize it, honor it and celebrate the life.

I said just let me try one more time and she said, “THAT’S ENOUGH, ISABEL,” again, and she could just say it over and over and it would never get through my thick skull because...

In my experience, self-hatred is the dominant malaise crippling Christians and stifling their growth in the Holy Spirit.

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear...

I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences. Like vivid, rainbow metallic skin cells on the wings...

What would you say to yourself if you could actually meet a younger you?

Self is what makes mind think, but never needs the mind. Self is what makes bodies live, but needs no existence for itself. Self can be realized; not by knowledge but by revelation.

I won’t explain why. If you’re interesting, you’ll find out who I am. One clue, I’m a ghost.

Master Yourself and you master your environment! Such is the nature of wisdom.

You are still what you think, despite what others think about you!

Cultivate the understanding that the self is not really an independently existing entity, and begin to view self instead in terms of it’s dependent relation to others. Although it is difficult to say that merely...

And I Said To My Soul, Be LoudMadden me back to an afternoonI carry in menot like a woundbut like a will against a woundGive me again enough manto be the childchoosing my own annihilationsTo...

…he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them them over...

Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

At some point, it’s time to stop fighting with death, my thighs and the way things are. And to realize that emotional eating in nothing but bolting from multiple versions of the above: the obsession...

Self love and forgiveness is a liberation.

I wanted to stay… me.

The truth remains itself, even the human minds cannot see it.

In real life, you just work for the ordinary self, but in the front of audience you become the superself. That’s a completely different thing.

Roses are RED.Violence is BLUE.Suger is SWEET.But not like YOU.

But now the other half of “us” was gone and, lying there in my shadowy room, I’d be struck with this realization that I had no clue how to be just me again.

It’s kind of depressing, if you think about it. I mean, me being so young, and yet so cynical and suspicious.

Though we rush ahead to save our time, we are only what we feel

The self was both its origins and its journey.

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might...