Inner Division Quotes

Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.

...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.

Managing life from our mental control towers, we have separated ourselves from our bodies and hearts.

I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.

Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast.

The bad man is continually at war with, and in opposition to, himself.

When I analyse myself and my reactions or behaviour, there is the act and the actor. There is a division between the two and that creates conflict between "what is" and "what should be".

How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?

But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.

The body sprang At once to the height, and stayed; but the soul,-no!

Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.

two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there.

The idea of the split personality is as old as Genesis. For a start, Eve was manufactured from Adam's rib. Then there's Cain and Abel, twins at war. They were followed by Esau and Jacob, likewise divisible into hairy and smooth types.

Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.

A divided heart offers a strange sensation.