Ipsum Quotes & Sayings

Ipsum Nomen Res Ipsa: The Name Itself is the Thing Itself. I.N.R.I.: Isis, Apophis, Osiris: IAO. — Robert Anton Wilson

Numquam enim audiendi quod aliquis monachus super puerum incubuisset, quin statim post ipsum surrexisset puer. I have heard before of a monk throwing himself on a boy, but the boyalways rose again afterwards. — Walter Map

Nothing is difficult to mortals; we strive to reach heaven itself in our folly.
[Lat., Nil mortalibus arduum est;
Coelum ipsum petimus stultitia.] — Horace

From earliest days I wanted to be someone else. The injunction nosce te ipsum had an ashen taste on my tongue from the first time a teacher enjoined me to repeat it after him. I knew myself, all too well, and did not like what I knew. Again, I must qualify. It was not what I was that I disliked, I mean the singular, essential me - although I grant that even the notion of an essential, singular self is problematic - but the congeries of affects, inclinations, received ideas, class tics, that my birth and upbringing had bestowed on me in place of a personality. In place of, yes. I never had a personality, not in the way that others have, or think they have. I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone, I know what I mean. — John Banville

In opposition to the absolutely and directly false Heideggerian theses attributing to Aquinas an onto-theo-logical metaphysics of Being, Aquinas's actual and genuine conception of God is articulated in the famous formulation according to which God is ipsum esse per se subsistens, Being itself subsisting through itself.

God is not a being (ens,) among other beings, thus not anything like the highest, first, or maximal being.

(p. 43) — Lorenz B. Puntel

To he "over-choiced" with thirty different kinds of bread does indeed develop the shopper's awareness of differentiation and sense of taste. However, from the ego that is becoming dependent on such a surplus of choice, it also takes away the time and energy for other life pursuits. The ego is diverted and, with the help of the world of consumer goods, "turned in on itself" (bomo incur-vatus in se ipsum), as the tradition used to depict the sinner.
The least to he learned from the tradition of mysticism is that becoming empty in a world of surplus, learning to switch off, and limiting oneself are small steps in the liberation from consumerism, and that perhaps freedom cannot he imagined without letting go. — Dorothee Solle