127 Inspiring Self-Reflection Quotes

In today's fast-paced world, finding moments for self-reflection is more crucial than ever. It allows us to pause, ponder, and gain deeper insights into our thoughts and actions. Engaging with inspiring quotes can be a powerful way to kickstart this introspective journey. Our curated collection of 127 self-reflection quotes is designed to inspire, challenge, and motivate you. Whether you're seeking clarity, personal growth, or simply a moment of serenity, these quotes are sure to spark introspection and foster a deeper connection with yourself. Dive in and let these profound words guide you on a path of self-discovery and empowerment.

1. “A friend is a gift you give yourself.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

2. “Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.” - Ian McEwan

3. “I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?” - Hermann Hesse

4. “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.” - Søren Kierkegaard

5. “We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.” - André Berthiaume

6. “A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts.” - Axel Munthe

7. “Can't get away from your own self.” - Holly Black

8. “In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.” - Oscar Wilde

9. “For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.” - Marcus Aurelius

10. “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.” - Henry David Thoreau

11. “The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.” - felix adler

12. “I've triedto become someone else for a while,only to discover that he, too, was me.” - Stephen Dunn

13. “True emptiness is not empty, but contains all things. The mysterious and pregnant void creates and reflects all possibilities. From it arises our individuality, which can be discovered and developed, although never possessed or fixed.” - Jack Kornfield

14. “Don't try to tell me what I am because I know what I am not” - Dr. Amit Abraham

15. “Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.” - Ayn Rand

16. “There can only be two basic loves... the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God.” - St. Augustine

17. “Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.” - Brennan Manning

18. “Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.” - Brennan Manning

19. “Live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness. Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are thoroughly and sincerely liked by someone...Scripture suggests that the essence of the divine nature is compassion and that the heart of God is defined by tenderness.” - Brennan Manning

20. “Happiness is part of who we are. Joy is the feeling” - Tony DeLiso

21. “Keep your best wishes, close to your heart and watch what happens” - Tony DeLiso

22. “I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?” - Aidan Chambers

23. “There comes a time when all that remains for us to do is to surrender to the idiosyncrasies of our nature.” - Floriano Martins

24. “You only exist because of the agreements you made with yourself and with the other humans around you.” - Jose Luis Ruiz

25. “Who are you?'I didn't understand the question.I'm Uri', he said. 'What's your name?'I gave him my name. 'Stopthief.” - Jerry Spinelli

26. “public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.” - Sigmund Freud

27. “My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.” - Jess C. Scott

28. “To deal with things knowledge of things is needed. To deal withpeople, you need insight, sympathy. To deal with yourself, you neednothing. Be what you are--conscious being--and don't stray away fromyourself.” - Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

29. “We carry about us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young -- not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age -- and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.” - J. Krishnamurti

30. “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 most secret self. Everyone wants to allow someone into their most secret self. Everyone feels so alone inside that their deepest wish is for someone to know their secret being, because then they are alone no longer. Don't we all long for this? Yet when it's offered it's frightening, because you might not live up to the desires of the one who bestows the gift. And frightening because you know that accepting such a gift means you'll want-perhaps be expected- to offer a similar gift in return. Which means giving your *self* away. And what's more frightening than that?” - Aidan Chambers

31. “I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.” - Mary MacLane

32. “We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us” - Andre Gide

33. “She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.” - Kate Chopin

34. “This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing.” - Sue Miller

35. “The problem with introspection is that it has no end.” - Philip K. Dick

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

37. “With the passage of days in this godly isolation [desert], my heart grew calm. It seemed to fill with answers. I did not ask questions any more; I was certain. Everything - where we came from, where we are going, what our purpose is on earth - struck me as extremely sure and simple in this God-trodden isolation. Little by little my blood took on the godly rhythm. Matins, Divine Liturgy, vespers, psalmodies, the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the constellations suspended like chandeliers each night over the monastery: all came and went, came and went in obedience to eternal laws, and drew the blood of man into the same placid rhythm. I saw the world as a tree, a gigantic poplar, and myself as a green leaf clinging to a branch with my slender stalk. When God's wind blew, I hopped and danced, together with the entire tree.” - Nikos Kazantzakis

38. “As long as you were comfortable with yourself and believed in yourself, then you could just throw out all that nonsense of worrying about your status and "success" and other people's opinions.” - James Collins

39. “Your dreaming self seeks to tell you something your waking ears will not hear” - Jacqueline Carey

40. “We are not of what we feel or believe to do, we are of what we do or fail to do.” - Judith McNaught

41. “When I loved myself enough, I would sometimes wake in the night to music playing within me.” - Kim McMillen

42. “The erotic state – again, a mixture of concentration and spontaneity – is a hypnoidal state, probably the most powerful kind that we are capable of experiencing, and it is in this condition that unexpected regions of the self are revealed, as the majority of people know from experience.” - Peter Redgrove

43. “When we put things off until some future-probably mythical-Laterland, we drag the past into the future. The burden of yesterday's incompletions is a heavy load to carry. Don't carry it.” - Peter McWilliams

44. “But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.” - Patricia Highsmith

45. “It is when you lose sight of yourself, that you lose your way. To keep your truth in sight you must keep yourself in sight and the world to you should be a mirror to reflect to you your image; the world should be a mirror that you reflect upon.” - C. JoyBell C.

46. “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?” - Julian Jaynes

47. “...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” - James Hillman

48. “Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.” - E.L. Doctorow

49. “I used to think that if I were a certain kind of person I would spend all my time creating something beautiful. Well, it turns out I am, and I am.” - Jason Letts

50. “Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.” - Octavio Paz

51. “The good news is that you may have created my past and screwed up my present, but you have no control over my future. You don't know me at all.” - David Klass

52. “The only thing you really have to prove is yourself.” - Tadahiko Nagao

53. “Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.” - Jess C. Scott

54. “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 to speak of the ego as if it were something different and apart: it is the true Self whereas the ego is only an illusion of the mind.” - Paul Brunton

55. “Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)” - Samuel Beckett

56. “Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal.” - Hermann Hesse

57. “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, one of the nation, of many nations, the smallest the same and the the largest” - Walt Whitman

58. “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 expression of justice is mercy.Thus, as the supreme judge in your own court, you must have compassion for yourself.Otherwise, cede your gavel.” - Vera Nazarian

59. “Man is originally characterized by his "search for meaning" rather than his "search for himself." The more he forgets himself—giving himself to a cause or another person—the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself.” - Viktor E. Frankl

60. “The first law of nature is self-preservation. Cut off that which may harm you. But if it is worth preserving, and is meaningful, nourish it and have no regrets. Ultimately, this is true living and love of self...from within.” - T.F. Hodge

61. “It is more substantial to represent a purpose, rather than just a title.” - T.F. Hodge

62. “Who you are is always right.” - DENG MING-DAO

63. “Don’t be surprised by your greatness. Be surprised that no one expected it.” - Rebecca Maizel

64. “I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of.” - Criss Jami

65. “There's always the option of deciding for yourself who you are and what you'll become.” - Jodi Meadows

66. “You can only get outside yourself by looking inside.” - Tonya Hurley

67. “I am afraid of darkness... even though it knows me it loves me.” - Ray Fawkes

68. “When our emotional health is in a bad state, so is our level of self-esteem. We have to slow down and deal with what is troubling us, so that we can enjoy the simple joy of being happy and at peace with ourselves.” - Jess C. Scott

69. “You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.” - N.K. Jemisin

70. “Most of us have nicknames—annoying, endearing, embarrassing.But what about your true name?It is not necessarily your given name. But it is the one to which you are most eager to respond when called.Ever wonder why?Your true name has the secret power to call you.” - Vera Nazarian

71. “... telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.” - Abraham Verghese

72. “When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even thoseyou love.” - Mitch Albom

73. “I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in the regard to all the for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority–like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner–it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time and practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.” - Albert Camus

74. “And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact of what we really are.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

75. “[T]he Enneagram is, at its most abstract, a universal mandala of the self—a symbol of each of us.” - Don Richard Riso

76. “The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.” - Jim Morrison

77. “Your inner strength is your outer foundation” - Allan Rufus

78. “Hope comes not from the people around you, but from yourself.” - Alegna G. Granados

79. “Each of us is several, is man, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.” - Pascal Mercier

80. “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” - Rumi

81. “For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

82. “I myself am an absolute abyss.” - Antonin Artaud

83. “Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?” - Oscar Wilde

84. “I'm as proud of my inconsistencies as I am my consistencies.” - Myles Horton

85. “We sit to make life meaningful. The significance of our life is not experienced in striving to create some perfect thing. We must simply start with accepting ourselves. Sitting brings us back to actually who and where we are. This can be very painful. Self-acceptance is the hardest thing to do. If we can’t accept ourselves, we are living in ignorance, this darkest night. We may still be awake, but we don’t know where we are. We cannot see. The mind has no light. Practice is this candle in our very darkest room.” - Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi

86. “Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.” - Anthony Burgess

87. “You can always tell the heart of man by what he do, and by what he don't do...” - Steven J. Carroll

88. “Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it... Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced...And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool—for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful...And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line—unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive—even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources—not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self—struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence—you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself.” - Ted Hughes

89. “I? This is the very root of all evil.” - H.M. Forester

90. “It's vital to remember who you really are. It's very important. It isn't a good idea to rely on other people or things to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong.” - Terry Pratchett

91. “Owing to ignorance of the rope the rope appears to be a snake; owing to ignorance of the Self the transient state arises of the individualized, limited, phenomenal aspect of the Self.” - Guru Nanak

92. “The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.” - Alain De Botton

93. “If you own this story you get to write the ending.” - Brené Brown

94. “Words are God’s gift to mend a broken soul.” - Chimnese Davids

95. “The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.” - Anais Nin

96. “I was tired of being me.” - Rachel Ward

97. “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.” - N. Scott Momaday

98. “To seek contentment is to release the novelty that lies within monotony” - Ilyas Kassam

99. “We are whiplashed between an arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves.” - Parker Palmer

100. “There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau

101. “The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times.” - Henry James

102. “I think I’d rather be branded than submit to some of the things that you have to.” He said this without spite, just a soft statement of fact. “I’m not strong enough to do that.” - Laura Bickle

103. “The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?” - Oscar Wilde

104. “Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.” - Jim Holt

105. “It's what's buried deep inside that frightens me because it's broken, like a shattered mirror.” - Jessica Sorensen

106. “We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.” - Alain De Botton

107. “I don't know what is better than the work that is given to the actor - to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself.” - Laurence Olivier

108. “I simply love being me. You have no power to control my feelings because I own my own heart” - che acebido

109. “Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.” - G.I. Gurdjieff

110. “Only themselves understand themselves and the like of themselves,As souls only understand souls.” - Walt Whitman

111. “The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existant and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail.” - Sri Aurobindo

112. “It's kind of depressing, if you think about it. I mean, me being so young, and yet so cynical and suspicious.” - Meg Cabot

113. “What an idiot I'd been. What a spoilt brat. What a bloody fool.” - David Millar

114. “If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.” - Terence McKenna

115. “Not at all. It's why people come. They say it's about looking smart, or beautiful, or professional, but it's not. Gray-haired ladies try to recapture their former brunette. Brunettes want to go blond. Other women go for colors that don't arise innature. Each group thinks it's completely different than the others, but I don't see it that way. I've watched them looking at themselves in the mirror, and they're not interested in conforming or rebelling, they just want to walk out of here feeling like themselves again.” - Antony John

116. “I'd rather strive for the kind of interview where instead of me asking to introduce myself to society, society asks me to introduce myself to society.” - Criss Jami

117. “We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.” - Anthony Marra

118. “Ego, Identity and Self - the 3 concepts of one's creation that defines them entirely. Have an Ego, for without one, there is nothing but self-doubt. Have an Identity, for without one, there is nothing but an empty shell. Understand your 'Self,' for if you don't, then who or what are you?” - Lionel Suggs

119. “As I, my real self, grew older, I entered more and more into the substance of my dreams. One may dream, and even in the midst of the dream be aware that he is dreaming, and if the dream be bad, comfort himself with the thought that it is only a dream. This is a common experience with all of us. And so it was that I, the modern, often entered into my dreaming, and in the consequent strange dual personality was both actor and spectator. And right often have I, the modern, been perturbed and vexed by the foolishness, illogic, obtuseness, and general all-round stupendous stupidity of myself, the primitive.” - Jack London

120. “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 reflecting on this will produce a profound spiritual realization, it will at least have some effect. Your mind will be more open. Something will begin to change within you. Therefore, even in the immediate term there is definitely a positive and beneficial effect in reversing these two attitudes and moving from self-centeredness to other-centeredness, from belief in self existence to belief in dependent origination.” - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

121. “By seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense forgets his own name, dares not believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, along with the crowd. Now this form of despair goes practically unnoticed in the world. Precisely by losing oneself in this way, such a person gains all that is required for a flawless performance in everyday life, yes, for making a great success out of life. Here there is no dragging of the feet, no difficulty with his self and its infinitizing, he is ground smooth as a pebble, as exchangeable as a coin of the realm. Far from anyone thinking him to be in despair, he is just what a human being ought to be. Naturally, the world has generally no understanding of what is truly horrifying.” - Kierkegaard

122. “Nature has gone to great lengths to hide our subconscious from ourselves. Why?” - Robert Wright

123. “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 basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ... In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it.The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.” - António R. Damásio

124. “When you eliminate the Ego's intense desire to be correct, the clarity of the moment can come through. How simple is that?” - Beth Johnson

125. “I value my ownindependence so highly that I can fancy no degradation greater than thatof having another man perpetually directing and advising and lecturingme, or even planning too closely in any way about my actions. He mightbe the wisest of men, or the most powerful--I should equally rebel andresent his interference...” - Elizabeth Gaskell

126. “The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.” - Nicole Krauss

127. “The sword wears out its sheath, as it is sometimes said. That is my story. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked. Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as if the possessions of Helen, or the throne of the Universe, had been at stake.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau