Self-Construction Quotes

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.

We think about education as a stepping stone into a higher socio-economic class, into a better job. And it does do those things. But I don't think that's what it really is. I experienced it as getting access to different ideas and perspectives and using them to construct my own mind.

The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

I make me. At 18, I decided I wasn't going to have an unconstructed self ever. I was going to be the composer, the designer, the architect of me. It's been really fun.

Even though it is difficult, it is easier for me to make my own things, by myself.

I construct myself and do things how I want to do them, because your artistry is a very precious thing - it's ultimately your whole life if you want it to be.

Much of social media can be seen as the 'News of me.' It's not so much a platform for connecting and sharing as it is a platform for advertising the idea of yourself you want to portray to others: the image of yourself you want to project.

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

I was born at home in rural Kentucky, in 1942, in a house that my father Howard had built. He did most of the construction himself and built it on land that his father had given him when he married my mother Faye.

Remind yourself. Nobody built like you, you design yourself.

The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.

Remind your self. Nobody constructed like you, you style your self.

I would never create an image for myself; I'm not that clever.

I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

I think in the whole field of questions about what we take to be "real," one of those questions is about the self. When you talk about the self we're always talking about whether it's a construction and it's a construction we're always in the process of working on. I don't think that work ever ends, to some degree.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

We're not just building a Temple here, the Lord is building us.

I'm interested in people forging their realities.

Mos Def is a name that I built and cultivated over the years. It's a name that the streets taught me, a figure of speech that was given to me by the culture and by my environment.

Most people don't form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

The freedom to choose...means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

The self is the class (not the collection) of the experiences (or autopsychological states). The self does not belong to the expression of the basic experience, but is constructed only on a very high level.

Identity is not found, the way Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes. Identity is built.

Choosing is a creative process, one through which we construct our environment, our lives, ourselves.

What would life be like if everybody insisted you must have actually built such-and-such a thing by yourself? I'd be an old man and have nothing to show for the aging.