Self-shaping Quotes

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature...

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Destiny is not a strange power which determines what shall happen to me. It is myself as given, formed by nature, history, and myself. My destiny is the basis of my freedom; my freedom participates in shaping my destiny.

However much we guard against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.

I was able to be influential and create a mold. There was no one else who was shaped like me or looked like me.

The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.

The mind doth shape itself to its own wants, and can bear all things.

Life is an endlessly creative experience, and we are shaping ourselves at every moment by every decision we make.

Parents can only advise their children or point them in the right direction. Ultimately people shape their own characters.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate

The patterns of activity of neurons in sensory areas can be altered by patterns of attention. Experience coupled with attention leads to physical changes in the structure and future functioning of the nervous system. This leaves us with a clear physiological fact…moment by moment we choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work. We choose who we will be in the next moment in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form in our material selves.

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Every man if he so desires becomes sculptor of his own brain.

Everything that has come my way has moulded me as an actor and as a person.

Schwartz's research suggests something important: we can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizeable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.

Life is shaped from the inside out.

The child, making use of all that he finds around him, shapes himself for the future.

Character is the architect of the being.

You see, it's never the environment; it's never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events - how we interpret them - that shapes who we are today and who we'll become tomorrow.

The one and only formative power given to man is thought. By his thinking he not only makes character, but body and affairs, for "as he thinketh within himself, so is he."

Your character will be what you yourself choose to make it.