Quotes: Self

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

The ultimate mystery is one’s own self.

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can’t even think straight.

Conscience: self-esteem with a halo.

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

But what many psychologists have done, probably because they did well on a test themselves and everyone wants high self esteem, is to create this little box and then do their research inside it.

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.

I recall feeling an almost delicious terror when one day I found myself alone in the midst of tall June grasses that grew high as my head. But here the secret working of self consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me to explain it.

Your real self – the “I am I” – is master of this land, the ruler of this empire. You rightfully have power and dominion over it, all its inhabitants, and all contained in its realm.