Pablo Neruda Quotes

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.

I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.

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

Freedom is the moment between sleep and waking before selfhood and the world return.

I'm simply pointing out that what happens to us isn't the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we're not together.

I am me, whatever that means. I am conscious.

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

Finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

I can say, 'Well, I'm a male. I'm a male human. I'm a medical doctor. I'm an author...' If I go to a religious point of view, I will say, 'I am a soul. I am a spirit.' If I go into science, I will say, 'I am energy. I am light.' But the truth is I have no idea what I am.

I've always thought that we are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are.

At times I think and at times I am.

Our nature is the mind. And the mind is our nature.

From ancient times, the core idea of the soul is the soul is the capacity to integrate different functions into a single being or into a single person. The soul is what holds us all together: what connects our will and our minds and our bodies and connects us to God.

The human body is not the person. Identity is the way the brain operates; it's memories, it's sensory input and output. The mind is the person.

I am Walter, a body, but more important than the body is my spirit.

If you don't know yourself, you don't know your nature. If you don't know your nature, you don't know where to exist. By knowing your nature, knowing yourself, you know what to be and how to live. And that only comes from knowledge of self, knowing yourself.

A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.

I find that when I do not think of myself I do not think at all.

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.

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home.

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

The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.

The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.