Quotes about sense-of-self

To accept one's past -- one's history -- is not the same thing as drowning in it it is learning how to use it.

Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death.

One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.

They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

To give value to others, you have to begin by valuing yourself.

It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child's. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognisable as a friend. And then I wasn't. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times I thought, with a horrified twist, that none of this was a gift. Suzanne got the redemption that followed a conviction ... I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me.

Beautiful moments in life need no words for description. Living those moments and feeling the beauty suffices.

O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae monie a blunder free us,An' foolish notion.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.

Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.

Up until then it had only been himself. Up to then it had been a private wrestle between him and himself. Nobody else much entered into it. After the people came into it he was, of course, a different man. Everything had changed then and he was no longer the virgin, with the virgin's right to insist upon platonic love. Life, in time, takes every maidenhead, even if it has to dry it up; it does not matter how the owner wants to keep it. Up to then he had been the young idealist. But he could not

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books.

One way to think of this dignity is to equate when you are on the path with unraveling a ball of yarn. You have wound your sense of self so tightly that it's hard to be anything other than you, a big ball of yarn. That's just who you are, not string, or threads, but a ball of yarn.

My sense of self has expanded and contracted like a schizophrenic accordion. I have questioned everything, and I have felt nothing. I have told the universe to f**k off, and I have fallen down weeping at its compassionate response.

I had the strangest feeling -- like I had lost something without ever really having it in the first place -- that I wasn't what I once was, and wasn't at all what I was meant to be. The sensation made me feel hollow down to my bones.

The greatest freedom in this world is a sense of self detached from appearances so that we may sacrifice today’s comforts for tomorrow’s opportunities.

It doesn't really matter how you feel about your character, it just matters what you do with it.

Newsflash she already has body image issues. It's an intrinsic part of being a woman. Every woman in the world has some part of herself that she absolutely hates. Her hands are too small, her feet are too big, her hair is too straight, too curly, her ears stick out, her bums too flat, her nose is too big and, you know, nothing you can say will change how we feel. What men don't understand is, the right clothes, the right shoes, the right makeup it just... It, it hides the flaws we think we have.

Unlike simple stress, trauma changes your view of your life and yourself. It shatters your most basic assumptions about yourself and your world — “Life is good,” “I’m safe,” “People are kind,” “I can trust others,” “The future is likely to be good” — and replaces them with feelings like “The world is dangerous,” “I can’t win,” “I can’t trust other people,” or “There’s no hope.

I think what's most interesting about me is the work that I do.

In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.

Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one's self, to attune to one's subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience. These woman's core sense of shame and their difficulty tolerating painful emotions had led them to avoid turning their attention inward to their internal sense of things. In recovering, they "came to their senses" and learned to trust their sensed experience, in particular their sense of "en

We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love. That remains the main problem and paradox for the frail. Many of the things that we want for those we care about are things that we would adamantly oppose for ourselves because they would infringe upon our sense of self.

If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

For in some ways the world was like a shopping centre, and he himself was a doubtful customer, often ineffectual, being talked into buying things he didn't want, things indeed which nobody in their right mind would want to buy.

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.

I will, without hesitation, walk away from anything and anyone that threatens my peace or sense of self.