Self-making Quotes

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other.

The coolest toys don't have to be bought; they can be built. In fact, sometimes the only way they'll ever exist is if you make them yourself.

A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with - a man is what he makes of himself.

We are what we make.

Is any man skillful enough to have fashioned himself?

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.

Others made you into who you were. You made yourself into what you have become.

The fun of living is that we have to make ourselves, after all.

Harry Cohn did not make me. But I also feel that I probably didn't make me, either. I think it was a combination. I think that's what made it work.

Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.

Nature in her whole drama never drew such a part; she has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man's own making.