Antonio Damasio Quotes

Ask any human being alive if they're the same person they were seven years ago and they're going to tell you they aren't.

I suppose we don't rely on comparison enough to tell us whom it is that we are talking to. We give people the liberty of fashioning themselves in the moment-a span of time that is so much more manageable, stageable, controllable than is a lifetime.

We're all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don't spend any time, or think they don't, on preparing themselves for the world out there - I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be a certain way, to present a face to the world.

I never thought about my image. It interests me that there are people who do, that they seem to be methodical about it. Maybe things would have gone differently for me in some ways if I had.

When somebody wants me to sign an old picture, it's like looking at another person.

I think I'm one of those people that kind of thinks everybody's got an identity, and maybe that's the core of their personality. But I think we change enough over the years that it's like a succession of different people.

He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form.

Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.

People are constantly trying to make an image for you. They'll dress you up and tell you to pose a certain way and take all these pictures... they want a certain image, so they create that. And unless you're spending a lot of time to create another image to counteract that image, theirs will win. So right now, I'm kind of dealing with a lot of false ideas of what I'm about.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

What do you know about yourself? What are your stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

I’m trying to get away from roles. I used to identify myself strictly in terms of my role, but when your roles fall away, part of you falls with them.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

At 23 years old, I came into politics as a dragon slayer. At 63 years old, I'm going out as a dragon.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

One builds one's life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.

it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

As we develop new beliefs about who we are, our behavior will change to support the new identity.

We were not always 70, or rather our 70 is an accumulation of all the other ways we were. Our 5-year-old selves became our 10-year-old selves, and so on and on; and if we unpack our selves, the full album appears. Every moment is a part of the following moment, and we are all a continuum.

Ego is simply an idea of who you are that you carry around with you.

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?