Knowing when someone's the real deal or not, but still with putting your guard up and self-protecting, you've got to stay open. It comes back to balance.
It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
The boundaries of your life are merely a creation of the self.
Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, hasbeen respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.
So long as we judge ourselves by human comparisons, there is plenty of room for self-satisfaction, and self-satisfaction kills faith, for faith is born of the sense of need. But when we compare ourselves with Jesus Christ, and through Him, with God, we are humbled to the dust, and then faith is born, for there is nothing left to do but to trust to the mercy of God.
Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.
God is all-full. He is self-contained. He is eternal satisfaction.
As a busker, one thing that does not work is self-consciousness. A busker needs to be working. A busker needs to shed all ego and get down to work. Play your songs, play them well, earn your money, and don't get in people's way.
Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.
In that power of self-control lies the seed of eternal freedom.
Everything in a wide sense is a kind of a self-portrait. It's just the way you see things and you're curious about certain things and just excited about them.
I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.
If you neglect to exercise self-control, you are not only likely to injure others, but you are sure to injure yourself!
Many of us have unconsciously erected barriers to protect ourselves from failing or succeeding. We may think we're protecting ourselves by denying our creative impulses, but all we're doing is burying our authentic selves alive.
Even the most independent and spirited young women can become humorless, self-absorbed, and fearful. It's a terrible preparation for life.
You think you can go into all those auditions not knowing who you are? The work came after I found my sense of self - when I wasn't so manic and desperate.
We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility.
True individuality is the repose arising from the relation of a self to all it has to do with. Bad individuality has in it a separation between outward action and a flat repose inwardly.
Find a model of great education in history and you will find a great teacher who inspired students to make the hard choice to study. Wherever you find such a teacher, you will also find self-motivated students who study hard. When students study hard, learning occurs.