Edwin Catmull Quotes

If you feel compelled to respond every time you're criticized it reveals just how much you've built your identity on being right.

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.

When I was younger, my father told me not to pigeonhole the way that I perceive myself.

Everything that's said against me offends me, whether it's true or not.

People don't like when you point out to them and remind them that they're not very smart.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

When something's wrong, even though you're the one doing it, you shouldn't feel defensive about it. It's hard because you have to protect yourself as a person in your life, but you can't protect yourself as an actor. You have to just take criticism.

I used to take it much more to heart. Now I realise that negativity has almost everything to do with the person delivering it and very little to do with you yourself.

I am much more interested in defending my ideas than defending my identities.

I know what my identity is.

My self encompasses a lot of different things.

Your world will follow your idea about yourself.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently.

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

You have to recognize that deep within your soul, you know who you are - and let [the criticism] go right by you. If you're reacting to it, you're letting it get to you.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us. This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good heart whatever they might have to say.

People call you this or that. But I can't respond because then it seems like I'm defensive, you know, what does it matter, really?

Above all, know that ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.

We all grasp on to a single idea of ourselves, the way aging people dye their hair. It’s no matter that this dye doesn’t fool you. My lady, you don’t dye your hair to decieve other people, or to fool yourself, but rather to cheat your image in your mirror a little.

Advice is offensive, it shows us that we are known to others as well as to ourselves.

Detachment doesn't mean I'm trying less hard. It just means that fears and emotions that used to torment and paralyze me no longer have the same power over me. Getting to this point hasn't always been easy; it took me years to really learn to silence my mind. But as you move through your career and your life, you will have to learn that if you're not what you do, then what you do has no business keeping you entertained at night.

I changed my name because it didn't fit with the way I saw myself.

You only know who you think you are. You sort of feel like you could change at any minute.