Dalai Lama Quotes

I had such a reputation, and it was sad because I felt like it so didn't represent who I really was.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

I would like to break out of this "dark, brooding" image, cause I'm actually not like that at all. In Ireland, brooding is a term we use for hens. A brooding hen is supposed to lay eggs. Everytime somebody says "He's dark and brooding" I think: "He's about to lay an egg".

A world view is probably an expression of self.

You know, most people really don't know me.

People often expect me to be something other than what I am.

All I want is for people not to see me as this cartoon monster.

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

But people who do not know me are surprised to see me as a real person I guess.

We define ourselves as intelligent. That's odd, because we're doing the definition - We're creating our own definition and saying, 'We are intelligent!'

Whatever labels are being pinned on me have nothing to do with me.

There are a lot of people who don't know me and what I am all about.

People see me as something I'm not.

People call me fussy, but that's a fallacy.

Even today I meet people who think of me automatically as a tough, insensitive, coarse guy named Stanley Kowalski. They can't help it, but, it is troubling.

Let's say for instance people say, "He's a really totalitarian, strict guy, he's hard to work with or whatever." I don't think it's true, but people's perception of me leads that direction, like I'm a fundamentalist person. I end up having to spend extra time saying, "I'm not a fundamentalist." I have other stuff to do.

Since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

I have an apple that thinks its a pear. And a bun that thinks it’s a cat. And a lettuce that thinks its a lettuce." "It’s a clever lettuce, then." "Hardly," she said with a delicate snort. "Why would anything clever think it’s a lettuce?" "Even if it is a lettuce?" I asked. "Especially then," she said. "Bad enough to be a lettuce. How awful to think you are a lettuce too.

Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.

In a way, it's like the photographer always has his vision of me. The pictures that I'm known for are not really my image, they're always the photographer's vision of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really my image.

Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.

Most people seem to think I'm the kind of guy who shaves with a blowtorch. Actually I'm bookish and worrisome.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.