With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

He liked what he had too much.

I wish I wasn’t an imperial highness or an ex-grand duchess. I’m sick of people doing things to me because of what I am. Girl-in-white-dress. Short-one-with-fringe. Daughter-of-the-tsar. Child-of-the-ex-tyrant. I want people to look and see...

…there is no better time to examine and understand one’s selfhood than when it is dissected and hurtling through darkness.

Secrets. Funny how, when you’re about to be given something precious, something you’ve wanted for a long time, you suddenly feel nervous over taking it.Everyone wants more than anything to be allowed into someone else’s...

A true legacy is established over a lifetime and relates to what a human being does for others, not for himself.

The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual’s autobiography, on the...

Happiness is attained, not through self-interest, but through unconditional fidelity in endless love of eternal light.

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

What an idiot I’d been. What a spoilt brat. What a bloody fool.

No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and – as a special class within the whole – mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it...

There’s a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to....

You can be yourself without pursuing yourself. Have you ever seen a dog chase his own tail? He just runs in circles.

Conversion of our views of self in light of God is continual. We daily have to take the time to notice and trust in who he is in order to understand who we are. The...

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their...

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears,...

Enlightenment is not about cocooning one’s self, but about integrating more fully with both your self and life.

Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.

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 over and...

What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet...

You are — your life, and nothing else.

Although Western society has emphasized the importance of high self-esteem, the more important thing may be to have self-compassion, the ability to treat oneself kindly in the face of failure, rejection, defeat and other negative...

Life isn’t only about choice. Life is about how you provide value to your life and others.

One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.

Give yourself something to work toward — constantly.

Sometimes our Biggest Nightmare turns out to be our Biggest Gift. And it all comes down to our attitude. Life will throw us curve balls and disappointments, even heartbreak. But ultimately we can choose if...

We are not our own light.

Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.

I once heard a tale of a man who split himself in two.The one part never changed at all; the other grew and grew.The changeless part was always true, The growing part was always new,And...

To take refuge with an inferior is to betray one’s self.

To be in a couple, do you have to put your single self on a shelf?

Our thinking will automatically improve when we remember the words of Paul: ‘know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and the spirit of God dwelleth in you?

Cultures, along with the religions that shape and nurture them, are value systems, sets of traditions and habits clustered around one or several languages, producing meaning: for the self, for the here and now, for...

Positivist man is a curious creature who dwells in the tiny island of light composed of what he finds scientifically “meaningful,” while the whole surrounding area in which ordinary men live from day to day...

Why India would accept self-rule in Kashmir as it has been controlling large part of the disputed region.

As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self...

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

When You Are Just You,People Will Always Bring Themselves.

Self motivation is essential for individual growth.

I am not able,” then I set up a self-fulfilling prophecy. As I think of myself, so I shall be.

Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library.

I firmly believe if a person is just bound and determined to self-destruct, what can you or anybody else do? What we can do is to make sure that child doesn’t just sit there and...

Whatever it is I’m born to do, my fear of failing at it has almost become greater than my desire to figure out what it is.

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.

I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or...

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from...

Healing is the journey. The destination is our self. The full recognition of all the different aspects of our self — our joy, our sorrow, our pain, our pleasure….all lead us to the source of...

I think myself so terribly ‘clever’ that the need for God is blatantly irrelevant. And all the while, in the rapidly growing mess that I’m ‘cleverly’ creating, I rather quickly begin to realize that the...

It is not for me to judge another man’s life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.

I protect myself by refusing to know myself.