Perception of Self Quotes

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakeable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.

I was walking around legally blind. Now I have 20-20 vision. I can't believe I spent so many years blurry, but I think that coincides with how I was feeling. Now I notice if people are watching me, but I also smile right back if someone waves, which helps.

I don't think that I'm old.

I have no idea how I'm perceived in America because I don't live the reality of America.

He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.

One thing you have to give up is attaching importance to what people see in you.

I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.

All my family is average-sized, apart from me. I didn't really think about my size until I got older, a few years before high school. It had never really fazed me that much.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

I'm not actually as emotional as everybody thinks. The songs are super personal, but that's just one side of me, and I guess people just assume I'm some troubled guy who's constantly sad.

Walking down the street in any town or city in the world and having people look at you and start talking to you, convinced that they know you as well or better than they do members of their own family, that's just an odd phenomenon. But I mean, I wouldn't say it was a bad thing. It's an interesting thing.

It becomes still more difficult to reconcile Japanese action with prudence or even sanity. What kind of people do they think we are?

To be completely honest, it's shocking to me that I keep getting the villain roles! I do not see myself as the villain and I know, growing up, I was the opposite of a villain. I would never try to be a villain to anyone - but maybe other people I grew up with feel differently about that.

I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.

I think I look okay.

You are what you think ... geez, that's frightening.

I'm a different girl almost every time I look in the mirror.

Maybe other people's ideas of us are truer than our own.

I think everyone still thinks I'm 13.

I was lucky not to have been born pretty.

Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness; his defeats will substantiate it.

It seems that different people have an idea of what I am, and what I should be. And then there's me.

One woman came up to me at a lecture and observed that I was much fatter than on television; I think I look better onscreen than in real life. It's the lights.

I could easily not be the person that people know.

You think you know who you are, and then other people have these other ideas.