Philosophy quotes about self

A friend is another self.

A person's character is their destiny.

I searched for myself.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

Claim yourself for yourself.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

I think, therefore I am.

The world is my representation.

How one becomes what one is.

Man is something that shall be overcome.

Despair is the sickness unto death — the self's refusal to be itself.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Existence precedes essence.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Solitude is the lot of all outstanding minds.

Despair is not to will to be oneself — or else to will to be oneself.

Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.

From the Son of Heaven down to the common people, all alike take the cultivation of the person as the root.

Heaven moves with vigor; the gentleman accordingly strengthens himself without cease.

One who knows others is wise; one who knows oneself is enlightened. One who conquers others has strength; one who conquers oneself is truly strong. One who knows contentment is rich; one who persists has will.

When the springs dry up and fish are stranded together on land, they moisten one another with dampness and wet one another with foam — but better to forget one another in the rivers and lakes.

Extend the innate good knowing.

Human life is life with awareness and understanding — or with a higher degree of such awareness. This is what distinguishes humans from beasts, and human life from the life of other animals.

Withdraw into yourself and look.

I am myself and my circumstance; and if I do not save it, I do not save myself.

Man is always more than he knows of himself.

That thou art.

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.

Bodhi originally has no tree; the bright mirror is not a stand. Fundamentally there is not a single thing — where could dust alight?

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.

Do not go outside; return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.

I do not portray being. I portray passing.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

As far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other.

Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.

The self is a relation that relates itself to itself.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Consciousness…does not appear to itself chopped up in bits…It is nothing jointed; it flows.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly…He did not know whether Zhou had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly was dreaming it was Zhou.

One is one's own refuge; who else could be the refuge?

One should lift oneself by the Self and not degrade oneself; for the Self alone is friend and enemy of the self.

Every day is a good day.

Ordinary mind is the Way.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

I am, I exist—whenever it is uttered by me, or conceived in the mind, it is necessarily true.

Man becomes an I through a You.

Seeing the good, be earnest to preserve it in yourself; seeing the not-good, be anxious to examine yourself.

Those who wish to cultivate themselves first rectify the mind; those who wish to rectify the mind first make the intention sincere.

You yourselves must strive; the Buddhas only point the way.

This mind is luminous—what more is there to say?

They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

Resist the beginnings.

Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast.

Despair is a sickness of the spirit.

The Master said: I do not resent Heaven, nor blame men; I learn from below and reach upward.

Spring has a hundred flowers, autumn the moon; summer a cool breeze, winter the snow. If no idle affairs hang in the mind, every season is a fine season in the human world.

to change my desires rather than the order of the world

To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

The Master said: To restrain the self and return to ritual propriety is ren. One day of this, and all under Heaven will turn toward ren.

One should lift oneself by oneself; one should not degrade oneself.

To carry the self forward and practice the myriad things is delusion; for the myriad things to come forth and practice the self is enlightenment.

Who would have thought that self-nature is originally pure; who would have thought that self-nature is originally neither born nor destroyed.

In the realm with a self, one views things through the self, so things take on one’s coloring. In the realm without a self, one views things through things, and no longer knows which is self and which is thing.

The evil we do is obscured and embellished by imagination.

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself.

Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.

Anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.

Empathy is a kind of experiential act sui generis.

The individual is only able to find another individual as a living body and as a sensing, feeling, and willing I.

The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.

Suppose a person were created at once, fully mature, but with sight veiled and limbs outstretched so that he touched nothing; he would affirm his own existence without affirming any body.

Know yourself, for the knowledge of the self is the key to the knowledge of God.

The thought of an African sage, even if he purports to be the spokesman for a group, is not necessarily that of all the individuals in that group, and still less that of all Africans in general.

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny.

The black man is not. Any more than the white man.

Négritude is the sum of the cultural values of the black world.

The African who has learned philosophy in English, for example, has most likely become conceptually westernized to a large extent not by choice but by the force of historical circumstances.

Philosophy, by definition, is an individual critical activity; the myth of a collective, unanimous African philosophy must be discarded.

Négritude, in my eyes, is not a philosophy. Négritude is not a metaphysics. … It is a way of living history within history.

The religious consciousness does not arise out of our own selves; it is simultaneously the call of God or Buddha.

Compassion always signifies that opposites are one in the dynamic reciprocity of their own contradictory identity. The religious will arise as the self-determination of this dimension of sympathetic coalescence.

At the point of our deepest questioning of ourselves, the religious quest awakens in us.

So long as the field of separation between within and without is not broken through, and so long as a conversion from that standpoint does not take place, the lack of unity and contradiction spoken of earlier cannot help but prevail among the things we take as real.

Ethics is, in the final analysis, the study of ningen — the human person as both individual and social, as “betweenness.”

Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquiro; “I conquer” is the practical foundation of “I think.”

It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is your mind that moves.

There is a true person of no rank who is always coming and going through the gates of your face.