My Bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. I think faith and guidance can help fortify a young woman's sense of self, a young man's sense of responsibility, and a sense of reverence all young people for the act of sexual intimacy.
The self is our life's goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality.
If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.
There is some lack either of sense or of character in one who becomes involved in difficulties with the worthless or the vicious.
I think it's important to have your own individual style and sense of self. It's kind of what I do.
The self is the modern substitute for the soul.
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.
Our body is the place that our memories and dreams call home for the time being.
Significance is about who we are before it is about what we do.
Life is consciousness.
I'm not jealous in traditional ways - of boyfriends or babies or bank accounts - but I do covet other women's styles of being.
The personal mission statement was important for me because I believe that you can't lead others unless you have a strong sense of who you are and what you stand for.
I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
Identity is this incredible invisible force that controls your whole life. It's invisible, like gravity is invisible, but it controls your whole life.
I always had the feeling that Bleachers is my soul.
Am I not allowed to have my pride? Or is that an emotion reserved for the elite?
We get off track. Capitalism takes us off track. You get off the "real" and get on the "wheel." The "wheel" becomes the winning and losing, the succeeding and failing, the "I will achieve." All that stuff becomes so preoccupying, particularly if you're born with low self-esteem, or no sense of yourself, or even if you're just born in the consumer culture. It's very powerful.
I didn't want to see her because it would make me feel better. I came because without her, it's hard to remember who I am.
I have a body, but I am not my body. I have a face, but I am not my face.
[On yoga] Once you've completed a wonderful class, you get a sense of the deepest, purest part of yourself. You feel like you are connected to everybody else in the world.
The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks.
That's the way I feel, at least: like there's a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.
We create stories to define our existence. If we do not create the stories, we probably go mad.
If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.
