Self-Concept Quotes

When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

Act as if you are the person you want to be.

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

You are what your record says you are.

Your capability is constant, but how much of it you use depends upon the identity you have for yourself.

We are what we believe we are.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

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.

I used to have only one name; it used to mean something.

Our identity is fictional, written by parents, relatives, education, society.

We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination.

You are the way you are because that is what you believe about yourself.

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

What is your identity, and how do you know who you are if you don't have language?

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

Even beyond sexuality, I'm generally interested in identity.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That's why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder.

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

Who you are moment to moment is just a story.

I have no personality, or I have three, depending on how you look at it.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.