Quotes About Self (page 25)
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The significance of that 'absolute commandment', know thyself? whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance? is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality? of what is essentially and ultimately true and real? of spirit as the true and essential bein
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Why novels and plays are so often untrue to life is because their authors, perhaps of necessity, make their characters all of a piece. They cannot afford to make them self-contradictory, for then they become incomprehensible, and yet self-contradictory is what most of us are. We are a haphazard bundle of inconsistent qualities. In books on logic they will tell you that it is absurd to say that yellow is tubular or gratitude heavier than air; but in the mixture of incongruities that makes up...
W. Somerset Maugham
sometimes i'd wake up at two or three in the morning and not be able to fall asleep again. i'd get out of bed, go to the kitchen, and pour myself a whiskey. glass in hand, i'd look down at the darkened cemetary across teh way and the headlights of the cars on the road. the moments of time linking night and dawn were long and dark. if i could cry, it might make things easier. but what would i cry over? i was too self centered to cry for other people, too old to cry for myself.
Haruki Murakami
I mean, if you were to find a shattered mirror, find all the pieces, all the shards and all the tiny chips, and have whatever skill and patience it took to put all that broken glass back together so that it was complete once again, the restored mirror would still be spiderwebbed with cracks, it would still be a useless glued version of its former self, which could show only fragmented reflections of anyone looking into it. Some things are beyond repair. And that was me.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Mephistopheles: Within the bowels of these elements, Where we are tortured and remain forever. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed. In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is must we ever be. And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that is not heaven.
Christopher Marlowe
In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.
Isaac Asimov
