D. H. Lawrence Quotes

There are always two sides to a person. CL is me, and so is Chaelin.

We have the real self and the false self, there's nothing wrong with them, and everyone has both of them.

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.

I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves?

Early in my career I was divided because I had the real self underneath: the lawbreaker, the anarchist, the person who swims against the tide, the outsider, the loner, all of that guy. He was my private self, and I had this other side that wanted to be liked in order to do all those things I dreamed of as a little boy. I didn't realize that those things didn't go together until later. And I'm quite sure that my use of acid and peyote helped me accept what was really going on inside of me instead of what I had imposed on myself.

The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.

The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.

Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

Certain faults are necessary to the individual if he is to exist.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being.

All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.

Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.

I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?

I'm fascinated by what makes up a self, how one becomes a self, how much is it an answer to others and how much is it an essence of self.

AMANDA: I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.

We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.

If I'd wanted to be an individual, I'd have taken up tennis.

Why haven't we, with all our cunning, experience, resolved this problem of fear completely? Isn't fear the cause of the 'me'?

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees.

The individual man tries to escape the race. And as soon as he ceases to represent the race, he represents man.

We humans are herd animals of the monkey tribe, not natural individuals as lions are. Our individuality is partial and restless; the stream of consciousness that we call 'I' is made of shifting elements that flow from our group and back to our group again. Always we seek to be ourselves and the herd together, not One against the herd.

For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.

If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood.