Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

When a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three...The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.

This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones.

We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don't, in small ways. That's what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

We're all going to be victims of temptation at several points in our lives.

We are never like angels till our passion dies.

Men are victims of their own impulses.

Temptation's something you have to deal with even if you're not famous. It's harder when you're famous because it's a lot more in your face, and that makes it a little more difficult to walk away from sometimes.

It's very clearly stated in the film: You make your own choices, and what you're always fighting is ego.

What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs.

A lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it.

I have to get a workout in in the morning. Once my day starts, I'll have the best intentions, and it still won't happen: one of the kids needs to be picked up somewhere, I have to hop on a conference call, or I'm just tired. So I get it done in the A.M.

It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.

The ego is not master in its own house.

It's almost as if we each have a vampire inside us. Controlling that beast, that dark side, is what fascinates me.

Do I get up every morning and ask: am I doing the things that I believe in and am I doing them for the best possible motives? Yes. Unambiguously yes.

You know what, life is full of temptations.

No mortal man has ever served at the same time his passions and his best interests.

If Bill was all id, Hillary is all superego.

The ego is kind of a big, unwieldy thing. It's not so easily tamed or subdued.

Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?

We may not have demon fathers dangling offers of infernal power before us, but everyone understands what it means to struggle with temptation or resist the urge to give in to our baser natures.

Human nature is you get carried away, so we have to protect ourselves from ourselves.

I'm not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego.