Norman O. Brown Quotes

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

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

Most people have a time-bound awareness. And the reason is they have sacrificed their self for their self-image.

There is no self-portrait of me.

People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

If you look at all the notions we accept about who we are, you find that they are all based upon our perceptual experiences.

We are what our thoughts have made us

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

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

I’m not anything that you think I am.

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

We are what we seem to be.

You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

We forget that the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.

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

...In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.

We are what we think.

We pass for what we are.

Through being "right", you feel superior and through feeling superior you strengthen your sense of self. In reality, of course, you are only strengthening the illusion of ego.

All ego really is, is our opinions, which we take to be solid, real, and the absolute truth about how things are.

Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display, and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist.