#oneself

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#believed #could #curious #handling #how

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#humility #love #narcissism #narcissistic #objective

Character is just an invention.... It is the self-fulfilling prophecy that guides our lives... and the longer we live with it the more boxed in we are by the rapidly diminishing variedness of our imagined selves. What we can't ever accept is that we might never know who we are. ↗

— Kamila Shamsie from Broken Verses

#knowing-oneself #imagination

This time, there was no escape, I could not turn away, could not leave without accepting what I had done. There was only one way to the other side, and that was through the pain. ↗

— Vanessa Diffenbaugh

#life #pain #philosophy #life

Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#demanding #does #endless #even #find

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is. ↗

— R. D. Laing

#being #false #feel #felt #guilt

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. ↗

— Bruce Lee

#another #know #oneself #person #study

One never comes into embarrassment, if one is ready to balance. To ask oneself never in embarrassment, what have you in these decades made. ↗

— Siegfried Lenz

#balance #comes #decades #embarrassment #into

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#anything #oneself #only #persuade #real

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. ↗