Lynda Barry Quotes

Of all the thoughts that rise in the mind, the thought 'I' is the first thought.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.

If you keep examining your mind, you'll come to see that thoughts of who you are and how it all is are creating the reality you're experiencing.

I don't feel I have an alter ego.

Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

I can't turn off the way I think, and that's essentially who I am, who anybody is.

We are what our thoughts have made us

Knowing who you are begins in the mind.

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.

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.

Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.

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

He who sees his soul is more than his life does not confuse the two.

I just don't like to be in my own - I'm already myself, so I don't like to be in my own - like, watch myself.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

Every one of us is the sum total of his own thoughts

All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

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

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

I'm a strange person. Sometimes I hardly know what I'm going to do or say next. Sometimes I seem a stranger to myself. Sometimes what I do surprises me and I can't understand why I do it.

The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.

I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche.