WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE WE IN GENERAL? What is the self? What are emotions, and how should we handle them? What should we believe in, if anything? Oh yes, I know these questions sound unbearably pretentious. Yet reading some of the attempts to answer them—made by people around the world and throughout time—is enjoyable and provides plenty of perspectives and possibilities to perhaps phase into our lives.
The mind is everything. What you think, you become.
At the center of your being
you have the answer;
you know who you are
and you know what you want.
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
Imagine awaking from a torpor having forgotten how your friends and family see you. Perhaps, unchained from everyone's expectations for how you ought to behave, you could be whoever you liked.
We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large.
I contain multitudes!
Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.
Between stimulus and response there is a
space.
In that space is our power to choose our
response.
In our response lies our growth and our
freedom.
It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
“What I believe” is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and government, not for the human intellect.
Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds.
I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary
process—an integral function
of the universe.
No feeling is final.
Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
I am never upset for the reason I think.
—Helen Schueman
There is no sight so ugly as the human face in anger.
No person is important enough to make me angry.
Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to. . . . Just as physical pain tells us to take our hand off the hot stove, the pain of our anger preserves the very integrity of our self.
Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its right channel.
People in a temper often say a
lot of silly, terrible things
they mean.
—Penelope Gilliatt
A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.
Anybody can become angry—that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
Anxiety is fear of one's self.
Worry a little bit every day, and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.
I've experienced many terrible things in my life, a few of which actually happened.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead
from a bough without ever having
felt sorry for itself.
Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? . . . Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.
Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
You are that which you are seeking.
If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.
Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.
Would you like you
if you met you?
—Tegan and Sara
When I look for my existence, I do not look for it in myself.
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find anti-models—people you don't want to resemble when you grow up.
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
The “I” in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable. I would not have thee believe in what I say nor trust in what I do—for my words are naught but thy own thoughts in sound and my deeds thy own hopes in action.
To be a man is to be responsible: to be ashamed of miseries you did not cause; to be proud of your comrades' victories; to be aware, when setting one stone, that you are building a world.
Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
Maturity is reached the day we don't need to be lied to about anything.
People seem not to see that their
opinion of the world is also
a confession of character.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Interviewer: So to you, faith is not a comfort?
Madeleine L'Engle: Good heavens, no. It's a challenge: I dare you to believe in God. I dare you to think [our existence] wasn't an accident.
Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.
The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.
Faith is not a belief.
Faith is what is left when your beliefs have
all been blown to hell.
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.
My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn't make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?
I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
A wise man once said, Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through.
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.
If there is anything the nonconformist
hates worse than a conformist, it's
another nonconformist who doesn't
conform to the prevailing standard
of nonconformity.
—Bill Vaughan
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.
I am human;
nothing human is alien to me.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics.
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.
We are dead stars looking back up at the sky.
There are more molecules of water in a cup of water than cups of water in all the world's oceans. This means that some molecules in every cup of water you drink passed through the kidneys of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Abe Lincoln or any other historical person of your choosing. Same goes for air: There are more molecules of air in a single breath of air than there are breaths of air in Earth's entire atmosphere. Therefore, some molecules of air you inhale passed through the lungs of Billy the Kid, Joan of Arc, Beethoven, Socrates or any other historical person of your choosing.
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.
You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.