Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet,. . . into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is. . . a lie.
Love of self comes first. The one who loves everybody is the one who does not love anyone.
People can very quickly have a very poor self-image. It doesn't take much.
Once the idea of a supernaturalistic creation is fully overcome, the idea returns that the universe must be self-organizing and therefore composed of self-moving parts. Also, insofar as dualistic assumptions are fully overcome and human experience is accepted as fully natural, it begins to seem probable that something analogous to our experience and self-movement is a feature of every level of nature.
Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.
I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul, I am the dialogue between my Self and el espiritu del mundo. I change myself, I change the world.
To not be self-conscious of your appearance is huge, and something that I desperately hope to carry into film at some point in my useless life - to not be thinking, 'My ear looks weird from this angle, why is the camera over there?'
It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained;. . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.
Democracy actually requires that the whole public be able to see common problems and address them and step outside of their own sort of narrow self-interest to do so.
To be forward to praise others implies either great eminence, that can afford to, part with applause; or great quickness of discernment, with confidence in our own judgments; or great sincerity and love of truth, getting the better of our self-love.
Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all—self-centeredness in its purest form.
Politicians make good company for a while just as children do - their self-enjoyment is contagious. But they soon exhaust their favourite subjects -themselves.
My advice to my younger self would have been, "Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out. "
PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.
I want to be judged by who I am as a person, not by what happened to me. In fact, all the bad things have only contributed to my confidence and sense of self, because I survived them and became a better and stronger person.
There is no such thing as time management; there is only self-management.
To all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All this decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.
Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
Of course I was wearing make-up, I never went anywhere without red lipstick for 25 years! It was a form of self-preservation for me to continue to wear lipstick even though my face was broken.
Consciousness, like a complex system of software, has thousands of levels of nested, self-accessing subroutines
