Sense Of Self Quotes

“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.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books.”
― Beatrice Sparks, Go Ask Alice

“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.”
― K.L. Toth

“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.”
― Robert Burns, The complete poetical works of Robert Burns

“When our thoughts are stammering in our mind, and memorial failure dumbs down our passion for life, a deep dive in the brainwaves can be the lever that lifts our sense of self. ("Walking down the memory lane" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.”
― Mick Jagger

“Instead of losing ourselves in a mental load of constant pleasing, let us take the time to appreciate ourselves and cultivate our values. Nurturing our core values allows us to lead authentic lives and build resilience, confidence, and a sense of self. ("Axelle Red" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When we interpret and transform external events into internal experiences, we can navigate our emotional odyssey, reconstruct our sense of self, and integrate the past into a coherent narrative, making sense of the present and preparing for the future. ("Camera obscura of the mind")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When "caregivers" become addicted to the neediness of others, their needs may become destructive or exploitative. If women give up their empowerment, they abandon their potential for freedom and personal growth and lose their own sense of self. (" Sweet smell of Submission")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Imbalance and self-destruction can be our inevitable fate if we devote ourselves entirely to others without previously nurturing a stable sense of self. (" Sweet Smell of Submission")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“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.”
― Mark Goulston MD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder For Dummies

“The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows that male sense of self disintegrates when the Other is absent.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Essays

“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.”
― Jenna Jameson, How to... Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale

“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 stay there. Not after the other people entered into it.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“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.”
― Margaret Mahy, Catalogue of the Universe

“Standing at the edge of my fears
And contemplating them
Is a healthy exercise.
The extent of the boundaries
Of who I believe myself to be.

What is in question as I stand
Safely at the border of myself
And think of leaping
Or continuing on?

What happens when I walk
To the extent of "I"
And then keep walking?
Who am I then?”
― Eric Overby, Senses

“Pour la première fois de ma vie, ce "moi" semblait se partager et la découverte d'une telle dualité m'étonnait prodigieusement.”
― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour tristesse

“Her whole childhood, she'd devoured stories of children with dead and missing mothers, often easier to find than stories of children whose mothers were alive and well. The absence of a mother was a promise of adventure; mothers made things too safe, too comforting. Children with mothers didn't need to look outside their homes for affirmation of their supremacy in someone's story. They didn't need to write their own protagonism.

Esther remembered Cecily complaining about this when they'd watched The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and Snow White, offended by the lack of loving birth mothers and the prevalence of monstrous stepmothers. She'd squeezed Esther tight and smeared her cheek with red kisses and said, 'This evil stepmother loves you very much.' But despite Cecily's love, which Esther had never doubted, she had already identified within herself the same motherless quality that drove Ariel to shore, Cinderella to the ball, Snow White into the forest. Her motherlessness was intrinsic to her sense of self, and her sense of self was all she had these many years alone.

What would it mean if her mother was alive? Not only alive, but aware of Esther and watching out for her, passing notes through magic mirrors and protecting her from afar, her own fairy godmother. What would it mean if her mother had not died, but left her?”
― Emma Törzs, Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“People are funny. I don't get people like I don't get most things. I get myself, but not them. You would've thought that because I was a person if I got myself, I would get them. But nobody seems to get each other, and everybody seems to get me even less.”
― Santosh Kalwar, The Society In Opposition To Everything

“Our addictions make us cling to what the world proclaims as the keys to self-fulfillment: accumulation of wealth and power; attainment of status and admiration; lavish consumption of food and drink, and sexual gratification without distinguishing between lust and love. These addictions create expectations that cannot but fail to satisfy our deepest needs. As long as we live within the world's delusions, our addictions condemn us to futile quests in 'the distant country,' leaving us to face an endless series of disillusionments while our sense of self remains unfulfilled.”
― Henri Nouwen

“We tend to take our sense of self for granted because it feels so fundamental to our
conscious experience, but it’s a feature the brain works hard to maintain. From the moment you took your first breath, your brain got to work, sifting through a barrage of sensations, emotions, and memories to create this illusion. I say “illusion” not to question your existence but, rather, to acknowledge that conscious experience has to be constructed, piece by piece.
As real and as wonderful as you undoubtedly are, being real doesn’t guarantee entry to
perception or awareness.”
― Rachel Barr, How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend: A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life

“. . . my experience as a psychotherapist working with people with troubled bodies shows that the kind of touch we receive when we are little and the impact of a mother's (or carer's) physical sense of herself are crucial to the development of our own body sense. Our bodies are a lot more than an executed blueprint given by our DNA.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“This is the essence of mindsight: We must look inward to know our own internal world before we can map clearly the internal state, the mind, of the other. As we grow in our ability to know ourselves we become receptive to knowing each other. And as a "we" is woven into the neurons of our mirroring brains, even our sense of self is illuminated by the light or our connection. With internal awareness and empathy, self-empowerment and joining, differentiation and linkage, we create harmony within the resonating circuits of our social brains.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“So when Barry accused me of not being a People Person, he wasn't wrong.

Sometimes I barely feel like a person, singular.”
― Holly Smale, Cassandra in Reverse

“I never pretend to be anything other than an Unfortunate.”
― Kailey Bright, Unity

“[...] I can bring you back. I’m sure I can.”
“You can kill me, you mean. You can destroy my sense of self and replace it with one you approve of.”
Strigan didn’t like hearing that, I could see.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

“Boundaries define where ‘we’ end and ‘they’ begin, protecting our identity and preventing us from being overwhelmed by the imperatives of others. Properly utilized, silence can be an extraordinarily effective method for establishing and maintaining such boundaries.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“The brilliance of this system (creating entire ecosystems of products) is that it often feels entirely organic, like a subliminal hum that vibrates just below the threshold of conscious awareness. Gradually and imperceptibly, our understanding of identity has been subtly rewritten by the invisible hand of the marketplace.
Every scroll and click is another lesson in this new language of identity, where being has
been replaced by buying. The most innocuous consequence would be simply purchasing a
pile of rubbish you don’t actually need. But the effects of these new market-driven social
norms can reach beyond your wallet, burrowing deep into your sense of self.”
― Rachel Barr, How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend: A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life