Passages about the self and identity

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.

Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.

This proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.

Some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me.

Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?

I deem that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and dying.

What do I know?

There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.

I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence, that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it.

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust. Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast.

Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Stay a while! You are so beautiful!

I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

Supposing truth is a woman, what then?

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow, said Mrs Ramsay. But you'll have to be up with the lark, she added.

What is the meaning of life? That was all, a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

The country places and the trees won't teach me anything, but the people in the city do.

The greatest of goods come to us through madness, provided the madness is given by divine gift.

What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes and never is?

The father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.

The soul is the first actuality of a natural body which has life potentially in it.

If the eye were an animal, sight would have been its soul.

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains, but it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smooths there, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.

Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike.

The True is the whole.

Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.

Faith is precisely this paradox, that the single individual is higher than the universal.

He who loved himself became great by himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.

Man has become a kind of prosthetic God.

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.

Humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself but in relation to himself.

He seems to me equal to the gods, that man who sits opposite you and hears you speaking sweetly and laughing. It makes the heart in my breast take flight.

Some say an army of horsemen, some of foot soldiers, some of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth; but I say it is whatever one loves.

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

Her limbs grew heavy and numb, a thin bark closed over her breast, her hair became leaves, her arms branches; her feet, so swift a moment before, stuck fast in sluggish roots.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king.

I am not what I am.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.

It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.

The monad is nothing but a simple substance which enters into composites; simple, that is to say, without parts.

Monads have no windows through which anything could come in or go out.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

It was badly done, indeed!

The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.

The worker therefore feels himself only when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.

Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?

The paradox is the passion of thought, and a thinker without a paradox is like a lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.

She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

We must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child.

Millions of women have done so.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

It was unearthly, and the men were. No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it, this suspicion of their not being inhuman.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

The ego is not master in its own house.

A dream is a disguised fulfilment of a suppressed or repressed wish.

My art of midwifery is in general like theirs; the only difference is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth.

Man is the measure of all things, of the things which are that they are, and of the things which are not that they are not.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

He began to wonder what it was that had left her, and where it had gone.

Everything that comes to be must have a cause, and the chain of causes cannot go on without end, so there must be a being whose existence is necessary.

For I, that God of Loves servantz serve, Ne dar to Love, for myn unliklynesse, Preyen for speed, al sholde I therfore sterve.

I am myn owene womman, wel at ese.

All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.

She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, / Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream. / It is not now as it hath been of yore.

I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

If you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, that is, the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

If you take the life-lie away from an average man, you take his happiness away with it.

I am the thirteenth at table.

I often think I have only one talent in the world, and that is a talent for boring myself to death.

For once in my life I want to have power over a human destiny.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as chain or train do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A river or a stream are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish.

Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.

The patient herself, who at this period of her illness strangely enough spoke and understood only English, gave this procedure the name of the talking cure.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked.

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

For a long time I went to bed early.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house and studied the lighted square of window.

She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart.

The aim of all life is death, and, looking backwards, that what was inanimate existed before what is living.

What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection.

Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture, not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.

In its relation to the id the ego is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces.

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is no arbitrary question. Why are there beings at all instead of nothing, this is manifestly the first of all questions.

Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing more uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

O Sugarman done fly away, Sugarman done gone, Sugarman cut across the sky, Sugarman gone home.

There must be some one faculty to which all the objects of the several senses are made known, so that we perceive that we see and hear, and discern that sweet is different from white, not by sight or by taste alone but by some common power.

Recollection is, as it were, a kind of search, and belongs only to those creatures which are also capable of deliberation, for it is a sort of inference, one thing calling to mind another to which it is related by contiguity, similarity or contrast.

Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, old age is suffering, disease is suffering, death is suffering, union with what is unpleasant is suffering, separation from what is pleasant is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering.

Now this, O monks, is the noble truth of the cause of suffering: it is that craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and passion, seeking delight now here, now there, the craving for pleasure, the craving for existence, the craving for non-existence.

You have a right to your actions, but never to the fruits of your actions. Do not let the fruits be the motive for your actions, and do not let your attachment be to inaction.

The soul is never born, and never dies. It is not slain when the body is slain. Weapons cannot cut it, fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it, wind cannot dry it away.

Thomas opens by declaring that whoever finds the correct interpretation of these hidden sayings will not taste death, establishing from the outset that genuine understanding of the collection's content, rather than mere belief or ritual practice, constitutes its actual promised path to salvation.

Jesus tells his disciples that the kingdom is not coming with observable signs people will point to, since the kingdom of the Father is already spread out upon the earth, and people simply do not see it, locating the kingdom as a present, perceivable reality rather than a future apocalyptic arrival.

The poem begins by praising the awakening mind, confesses faults and generates the resolve, establishing the bodhisattva vow to attain enlightenment for the sake of all beings as the practice's central organizing and motivating principle throughout.

The chapter on patience argues against anger, and the meditation chapter teaches the exchange of self and other, offering a genuinely concrete practical technique for cultivating compassion through systematic contemplative exercise rather than abstract aspiration alone.

John summarizes the accumulated teaching of the Greek Fathers on the Trinity, organizing several centuries of theological development into a single coherent account of God's triune nature, a systematizing achievement rather than new doctrinal innovation.

He addresses at length the incarnation and the two natures and two wills of Christ, human and divine, a central and historically contested Christological question that had generated considerable theological controversy across the preceding centuries of Greek patristic debate.

The first intellect is that which Aristotle calls the intellect that is always in actuality; it is the agent that causes the soul's potential intellect to become actual.

The second intellect is that which the soul possesses potentially, before it has actually engaged in intellection.

The word intellect is used in several senses: the sense in which the common people use it, the sense used by the theologians, and the several senses in which Aristotle used it in the Posterior Analytics, the Ethics and On the Soul.

The intellect in potentiality is like a tablet on which nothing is yet written; the intellect in actuality is that same power once it has come to possess intelligible forms.

One of us should imagine himself created all at once, complete, but with his sight veiled from observing external things, created floating in the air, not touching anything, his limbs separated from one another so that they do not meet or touch, and then he considers whether he would affirm the existence of his self.

He would not doubt his affirmation of his own existence, even while he does not affirm the existence of any exterior limb of his, nor any interior organ, whether heart or brain, nor any other external thing at all.

I came to know that what most distinguishes the Sufis is something that can be attained only by immediate experience, by ecstasy and by a moral change.

The disease was baffling, and it lasted almost two months, during which I was a determinist in fact, though not in theory or belief. Then God cured me of this malady. My spirit regained its health and equilibrium.

Ibn Arabi's poems mourn a departed beloved in the classical manner of the qasida, naming the abandoned desert campsites, the departing caravan, and the stations of the pilgrimage, working entirely within poetic conventions inherited from earlier Arabic love poetry.

He describes a heart that has become capable of every form, a pasture for gazelles and a convent for monks, a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba, and tables of the Torah and the scroll of the Quran, a single image absorbing multiple religious traditions' particular symbols into one unified capacity for love.

Whoever therefore is not enlightened by such splendor of created things is blind; whoever is not awakened by such outcries is deaf; whoever does not praise God because of all these effects is dumb; whoever does not note the first principle from such clear signs is a fool.

Open your eyes, alert the ears of your spirit, open your lips and apply your heart, that in all creatures you may see, hear, praise, love and worship, glorify and honor your God.

Dante recounts that when he first saw Beatrice, both of them nine years old, his vital spirit trembled so violently that he felt it in the most secret chambers of his heart, and from that moment love ruled over his soul.

In his sonnet on love and the gentle heart, Dante writes that love and the noble heart are a single thing, exactly as the philosopher says in his poem, one existing only where the other already is.

Petrarch describes climbing Mont Ventoux in Provence with his brother Gherardo on 26 April 1336; Gherardo takes the direct steep route while Petrarch keeps seeking easier paths and finds himself lower than before, which he reads as a figure for his own moral life.

At the summit, overwhelmed by the view, Petrarch opens the copy of Augustine's Confessions he carries and lands on the passage rebuking men who admire mountains and neglect themselves, a sudden interruption of pure aesthetic wonder by religious self-examination.

The first book warns directly against learning pursued without humility, insisting that intellectual sophistication and theological knowledge accomplish little of genuine spiritual value if pursued without the corresponding interior humility that alone makes such learning actually useful to the soul.

The second book turns inward to the interior life, treating sustained self-examination and interior transformation, rather than external religious observance considered on its own, as the genuine substance of Christian spiritual practice the reader is being guided toward.

All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of merit, or which really has a semblance of merit, if so be they are men of truth and good repute, should write the tale of their life with their own hand.

I began to throw in the pewter plates, plates and bowls, to the number of some two hundred, all at once, into the channels, feeding the furnace at the same time with wood, until the fury of the fire caused the bronze to flow.