Jonathan Haidt Quotes

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?

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

I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self. And it exists for very special purposes and it has very special, and I think by and large good consequences, although not only good consequences.

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now.

If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.

For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.

If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.

I'm used to hearing myself. My own voice.

I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

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

Consciousness is a singular for which there is no plural.

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

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.

It's hard for me to describe my own style because I'm me.

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

Sometimes I almost feel just like a human being.

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

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

I know that I exist; the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.

Man is not what he thinks he is, but what he thinks, he is.

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