Oneself Quotes - Page 17

• To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

  Georges Bataille

  God, Pain, Mean

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• The mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself; and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more energetic than the governed.

  Marquis de Sade

  Mean, Government, Vices

  marquis de Sade (1988). “Juliette”, Grove Press

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• A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.

  Bernard Berenson

  Self, May, Aging

  Bernard Berenson (2013). “Sketch For A Self Portrait”, p.15, Read Books Ltd

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• To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God - that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.

  W. H. Auden

  God, Prayer, Children

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• Once the ego is not there, there is no expectation, frustration, no desire, no despair. Suddenly one finds oneself falling into a deep harmony with the cosmos. And that harmony is God; that harmony is nirvana; that harmony is tao.

  Rajneesh

  Fall, Frustration, Expectations

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• One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.

  Carl Jung

  Reality, Thinking, Littles

  Carl Gustav Jung (1981). “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”, p.123, Princeton University Press

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• This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life.

  Carl Rogers

  Good Life, Mean, Growing

  Carl Rogers (2012). “On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy”, p.196, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Real, Love Is, Objectivity

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Art of Loving”, p.119, Open Road Media

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• Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole.

  Martin Heidegger

  Men, Fog, Profound

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• Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die.

  Jacques Derrida

  Plato, Philosophical, Mean

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• There is no one who has no leisure time at all. The office is not a permanent sanctuary, and Sundays are an institution. Thus, in principle, during those beautiful hours of free time everyone would have the opportunity to rouse himself into real boredom. But although one wants to do nothing, things are done to one: the world makes sure that one does not find oneself. And even if one perhaps isn't interested in it, the world itself is much too interested for one to find the peace and quiet necessary to be as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves.

  Siegfried Kracauer

  Beautiful, Real, Sunday

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• If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Humility, Perspective, Language

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• Take what you can yourself, and don't let others get you into their hands; to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life.

  Ivan Turgenev

  Hands, Things In Life, Whole

  Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1983). “First love”, Viking Adult

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• A longing for excitement can be satisfied without external means within oneself: For creating is the most intense excitement one can come to know.

  Anni Albers

  Mean, Creating, Excitement

  Anni Albers (1962). “On designing”

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• I think its important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

  Vaclav Havel

  Distance, Thinking, Important

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• Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet. It is a frightening thing to open oneself to this strange and dark side of the divine; it means letting go our sane self control, that control which gives us the illusion of safety. But safety is only an illusion, and letting it go is part of listening to the silence, and to the spirit.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Letting Go, Plato, Mean

  FaceBook post by Madeleine L'Engle from Nov 04, 2016

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• Well used are those cruelties (if it is permitted to speak well of evil) that are carried out in a single stroke, done out of necessity to protect oneself, and are not continued but are instead converted into the greatest possible benefits for the subjects. Badly used are those cruelties which. although being few at the outset, grow with the passing time instead of disappearing. Those who follow the first method can remedy their condition with God and with men; the others cannot possibly survive.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Men, Evil, Done

  Niccolo Machiavelli (1979). “The Portable Machiavelli”, p.75, Penguin

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• To live is to love,to serve, to forgive. Love the One, love and serve humanity. To learn to love oneself and to love is to learn to forgive

  Tariq Ramadan

  Love Is, Humanity, Forgiving

  Twitter post from Feb 13, 2013

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• Purification being highly infectious, purification of oneself necessarily leads to the purification of one's surroundings.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Purity, Surroundings, Purification

  Mahatma Gandhi (1948). “Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth”, p.454, Courier Corporation

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• Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Mind, Wish, Position

  "History and Utopia". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1960.

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• To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Hatred, Vengeance, Pardon

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• Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  People, Tasks, Sometimes

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• Pay no attention to the faults of others, things done or left undone by others. Consider only what by oneself is done or left undone.

  Gautama Buddha

  Buddhist, Buddhism, Helping Others

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• To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.

  Socrates

  Wise, Apology, Thinking

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• Though thousand times a thousand in battle one may conquer, yet should one conquer just oneself, one is the greatest conqueror.

  Gautama Buddha

  Military, Battle, May

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