Wendell Berry Quotes

There is nothing else anything like so interesting to ourselves as ourselves.

Humanity is a failed experiment, but I think I'm God and I'd like to start over. I don't want to die, I just want everyone else to. I certainly would not be lonely. It would be exciting never having to listen to another person again but just my own self droning on and on. That's why I write a blog. And I read it, too.

I just don't want to be self-obsessed.

The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy.

I use to live in a room full of mirrors, all I could see was me.

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

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

There is nothing so depressing as a constant contemplation of one's self, and the greatest moral cowardice in the world's opinion comes from consulting one's own personal convenience.

Actors and actresses who say they never go to see their own pictures are talking through their hats. You don't have to be a Freud to know that the most fascinating person in the world - actors or anybody - is yourself.

It's no wonder human beings are so narcissistic. The way our ears are constructed, we can hear only what is right next to us or else the internal monologue inside.

The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.

Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.

Self-absorption intensifies isolation, but permits it to go unnoticed.

Self-contemplation is apt to end in self-conceit.

living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.

In my younger years my dedication may have expressed itself egotistically.

I find myself fascinating.

Narcissism is the part of my personality that I am the least proud of, and I certainly don't like to see it highlighted in everybody else I meet.

We're a whole culture of people who have a really hard time seeing beyond themselves.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

Everything I write is about me.

I think everybody identified at a pretty young age that I was fairly entranced with myself. And that I had to be tempered.

I don't see outside of me.

A person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.