Quotes About Self (page 16)
...poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know that drunkenness too is not a virtue and that's even truer. But destitution, dear sir, destitution is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul , but in destitution-never-no-one. For destitution a man is not chased out of society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, for in destitution I am the first to humiliate my self.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't anywhere. I was myself, waiting on...
Haruki Murakami
A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego thatrelates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect. he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, allknowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything andeverybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.
Karen Armstrong