Self-Conception Quotes

How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!--and such reverence is a bridge to love.--For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! In contrast to this, picture "the enemy" as the man of ressentiment conceives him--and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived "the evil enemy," "the Evil One," and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a "good one"--himself!

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 will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

Yes, I talk about eating disorders and you know, excessive dieting and excessive exercising can be a sign of a mental illness... but when we talk about eating disorders... the issue is not the food or the exercise, the issue is a lack of healthy conception of self. That is the issue.

Words create conceptions and self-conceptions and ultimately nations. They can start and stop wars. They can would and heal. Choosing words carefully is a moral responsibility.

When I said that I am the Buddha, the Christ, the Lord Maitreya, and more, it was not a question of superiority or inferiority. I added that phrase 'and more' very carefully, because I knew that people had a very limited understanding of the Buddha and the Christ, and hence if I said: 'I am the Christ, the Buddha', they would limit that Reality to their own conceptions of the Buddha or the Christ, and Life has no limit.

America’s gun culture is an invented tradition. It was not present at the creation of America, whenever we fix that point. Rather, it developed in a single generation, among those who experienced the onset of the Civil War. All cultural attributes have a starting point, and a path of development. America’s gun culture is unusual only in that one can determine the precise period in which a specific artifact became central to a nation’s identity and self-conception. Prior to the 1860s, guns were not perceived as a significant component of America’s national identity, essential to its survival.

[John Boswell] introduction of the concept of "gay" (in the way he defines it) provides us both with a useful instrument of research and at the same time a better comprehension of how people actually conceive of themselves and their sexual behavior.

Heroes, notwithstanding the high ideas which, by the means of flatterers, they may entertain of themselves, or the world may conceive of them, have certainly more of mortal than divine about them.

People's conceptions about themselves and the nature of things are developed and verified through four different processes: direct experience of the effects produced by their actions, vicarious experience of the effects produced by somebody else's actions, judgments voiced by others, and derivation of further knowledge from what they already know by using rules of inference

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

God, great principle of all minor principles, God, who is Himself without a principle, could not conceive Himself, if, in order to do it, He required to know His own principle.

At least in the U.S., the party you believe in plays a big role in how you conceive of yourself. It feels good to think that your party is smarter, and that the smarts are what drive people to your party.

Free will is "corrupted nature's deformed darling, the Pallas or beloved self-conception of darkened minds"

We need to conceive of ourselves as "agents" impelled by self-generated intentions.

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.

We cannot divorce what we are producing from what we are. We create technology out of the vision we have of ourselves. If we are blind in our conception of ourselves we will create a blind technology.

I do not find God outside myself or conceive him except as my own and in me.