Antonio Damasio Quotes

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

Although he may not be human, it’s good that Messi still thinks he is.

The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.

Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character - it's almost as if I can't get away from them even if I want to.

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?

Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.

I'm not always what I think I am, but I am what I think.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

We live our lives based on who we think we are.

A lot of people thought the sense of self was hard-wired, but it's not at all. It can be changed very quickly, and that's very intriguing.

The mind, whatever else it is, is a constant of everyone's experience, and, in more ways than we know, the creator of the reality that we live within... Nothing is more essential to us.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

Some people want to define themselves, and they should, as it's part of their identity. For me personally, I've never really had a label for myself.

My self encompasses a lot of different things.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

What I do and who I am are two different things. And they always will be.

The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.

You are the imagination of yourself.

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

I think in the whole field of questions about what we take to be "real," one of those questions is about the self. When you talk about the self we're always talking about whether it's a construction and it's a construction we're always in the process of working on. I don't think that work ever ends, to some degree.

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

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

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.

I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.

I believe it is our own misperceptions of who we really are that leads to every self-created hell you'll find in this world.