Outside Of Ourselves Quotes & Sayings

Holy Week challenges us to step outside ourselves so as to attend to the needs of others: those who long for a sympathetic ear, those in need of comfort or help. We should not simply remain in our own secure world, that of the ninety-nine sheep who never strayed from the fold, but we should go out, with Christ, in search of the one lost sheep, however far it may have wandered. — Pope Francis

The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves. — Anais Nin

When we believe in the world outside of ourselves, gain is often perceived as good and loss as bad. When we stop believing in a world external to self. that reverses: gain becomes bad and loss becomes good. Nothing we can lose was ever ours in the first place. All we can ever lose is illusion. — Jed McKenna

Instead of educating the I.Q., we need to educate the H.Q., the heart quotient, the matters of truth, love, justice, and compassion. There are two ways to do this. One is through the read life experiences and the other is through literature. Literature has the power to take us outside ourselves and returns to ourselves a changed self. — Jim Trelease

Nothing outside of ourselves will ever make us happy, because happiness is an inside-out experience. — Robert Anthony

How ironic it is then, to realize how many of we humans are masochists! That even when we are placed in paradise, the majority of us would, by choice, focus on everything outside the present moment and make ourselves suffer by thinking about Dis-Ease! Too many of us would dwell on a past that no longer exists while everything in the present moment is wonderful. What great paradoxes we as humans are capable of! — Alaric Hutchinson

I remember the first time I went to Europe, I had someone take a picture of me there, so I could really see myself there. There's a sense of being outside yourself, and I think celebrity allows us that too, to be outside ourselves. — Jess Walter

Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows "that is not me." In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing. — Audre Lorde

With money we really fool ourselves. We are our biggest enemies with money and there are some things we can do about it. Automatic deductions are a wonderful thing. But ideally, you should wait until the end of the month, you can see how much extra money you had, and you should put that in your savings account. We don't do that too well, and if we did that, we would never save. So, what we do, is we take money out of our pocket into the saving account at the beginning of the month, take it outside of our control and as a consequence, we spend less and we save more. — Dan Ariely

Begin with art, because art tries to take us outside ourselves. It is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other. — W.E.B. Du Bois

In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute but relative both to the observer and the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects will become. We can never accelerate ourselves to the speed of light, and the harder we try(the faster we go) the more distorted we become, relative to an outside observer. — Bill Bryson

I used to say to myself that happiness and misery depend on ourselves. If you feel unhappy, rise above it and act so that your happiness may be independent of all outside events. — Robert K. Massie

What goes unsaid is that women might be more ambitious and focused because we've never had a choice. We've had to fight to vote, to work outside the home, to work in environments free of sexual harassment, to attend the universities of our choice, and we've also had to prove ourselves over and over to receive any modicum of consideration. — Roxane Gay

Courage does not require rappelling across rocky cliffs but rather, day in and day out, overcoming our fears by stepping outside our personal comfort zone, following our intuition, and making ourselves available to the larger plan. It means we transcend our limited self-definitions to be open to new information and stretch beyond the way we've always done things in the past. It means we listen within and sometimes turn left when everyone else seems to be going right. It allows us to risk ridicule to create something new, or to risk rejection when we are being true to our sense of what's right. — Charlene Belitz

There is another important point: encountering the poor. If we step outside ourselves we find poverty. Today-it sickens the heart to say so-the discovery of a tramp who has died of the cold is not news. Today what counts as news is, maybe, a scandal. A scandal: ah, that is news! Today, the thought that a great many children do not have food to eat is not news. This is serious, this is serious! We cannot put up with this! Yet that is how things are. We cannot become starched Christians, those over-educated Christians who speak of theological matters as they calmly sip their tea. — Pope Francis

What we are is what we receive. It is not about waiting for something outside ourselves to change - we must actively be the change if we wish to see the result. — Alaric Hutchinson

Adversity challenges the masks we hide behind, revealing sides of ourselves we have not yet comfortably with the world outside. It is why we dislike adversity, because we have to face what we don't yet understand about ourselves. — Michael Arndt

Love and hatred are not merely subjective feelings, affecting the inward universe of those who experience them, but they are also objective forces, altering the world outside ourselves...if this is true of my love, it is true to an incomparably greater extent of Christ's love. The victory of his suffering love upon the Cross does not merely set me an example, showing me what I myself may achieve if by my own efforts I imitate him. Much more than this, his suffering love has a creative effect upon me, transforming my own heart and will, releasing me from bondage, making me whole, rendering it possible for me to love in a way that would lie altogether beyond my powers, had I not first been loved by him. — Kallistos Ware

Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort. — Erich Fromm

No one outside of our family unit would ever guess that away from prying eyes, we were systematically tearing ourselves apart. Away from the outside world, everyone in our family started to fall to pieces, and never really recovered. Even though our times together are always fun and laughter-filled, the closeness we once shared is gone. In its place is guilt, regret, the ability to say the nastiest things and, for the longest minute on earth, mean every word of them — Dorothy Koomson

Normally, to decide whether we are alive we do not look outside of ourselves to find out if we are nourishing and generating life. We look into ourselves to find out how strong and healthy and vital we are. But the notion of the seed that dies demands an extraordinary redirection of the sense of life. Now to know if anyone is alive, we do not look at them; look beyond them to the mode of their expenditures and the life that they nourish and preserve beyond themselves. — Arthur C. McGill

The Gospel is entirely objective. The Gospel is completely outside of ourselves. The Gospel is not about the change which needs to be made in us, and it does not take place within us. It was completed in Christ, quite apart from us, almost two thousand years ago. The Gospel is not dependent on man in any way. The Gospel is distorted when we turn people's eyes to what is to be accomplished in them. We were not and cannot be involved in any part of Christ's historical, finished, redemptive work. The sinner must be taught to look completely away from himself and trust only in Christ and His work of salvation. — Trevor McIlwain

When a body is acted upon by external forces besides its weight it tips over on one side of the base if the (so-called) weight (vector) acts along a line through the so-called center-of-mass that intersects the supporting surface outside the base of the body; in the case of a stable equilibrium, the weight vector points inside the base, in the case of an unstable equilibrium it points exactly toward the tilting edge of the base, "tilting edge of the base" underlined. We always went to far, so Roithamer, so we were always pushing toward the extreme limit. But we never thrust ourselves beyond it. Once I have thrust myself beyond it, it's all over, so Roithamer, "all" underlined. We're always set toward the predetermined moment, "predetermined moment" underlined. When that moment has come, we don't know that it has come, but it is the right moment. We can exist at the heighest degree of intensity as long as we live, so Roithamer (June 7). The end is no process. Clearing. — Thomas Bernhard

The fact that we are culturally ignorant and we don't know what our heritage is, the price that we pay is that we act outside of ourselves almost all the time. We make very bad decisions how we deal with other people and their culture. — Wynton Marsalis

What kind of self-respecting man doesn't read? That's like saying he doesn't feel the need to eat or bathe either. Reading is nurturing of the mind ... a cleansing of the soul. It opens our eyes to unseen beauty, and our hearts to the untouched pieces of ourselves that we've hidden away from the world. A man without words is a man who has no real awareness of anything or anyone outside of himself. — S.L. Jennings

Outside our consciousness there lies the cold and alien world of actual things. Between the two stretches the narrow borderland of the senses. No communication between the two worlds is possible excepting across the narrow strip. For a proper understanding of ourselves and of the world, it is of the highest importance that this borderland should be thoroughly explored. — Heinrich Hertz

'Maze Runner' is about a group of teens that live inside this giant maze. And outside the maze are these creatures that come out at night. The centerpiece of the maze where we stay is called the Glades, and we call ourselves the Gladers. — Jacob Latimore

Someone must transform income into the food, shelter, clothing, nurture, discipline, education, minding, nursing, transportation, and emotional support that creates life outside of the office, permits survival of the race, cares for the ill and disabled, and makes life livable when we can no longer care for ourselves. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

As women of the western world, we see our sisters in other lands being raped, maimed and even executed simply for trying to exercise the most basic freedoms, such as taking a bus alone or wearing a bright red sweater. And when we look at our own world, we see that it too still lacks equality for the sexes.
It's a terrible thing to go through one's entire lifetime not getting to do all the things we dream of doing just because others say we're not permitted to do them, and to know that they will hurt us if we try.
But far, far worse than that is when there's not a thing or a person outside that's stopping us from living exactly as we wish, but we stop ourselves; internally we do not give ourselves permission, simply because we're too scared of what will happen if we dare. — PatriciaV. Davis

Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously, I lost track of what I was taught. — Tiger Woods

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because we owe it to ourselves. — Henry Hazlitt

Eventually we grow weary of seeking treasures outside
ourselves and we begin to look within. There we discover
that the gold we sought, we already are. — Alan Cohen

The greater our attachment to that which is outside of ourselves, the greater is our overall level of fear and vulnerability to loss. We can ask ourselves why we feel so incomplete. "Why am I so empty within myself that I have to search for solutions in the form of attachment and dependency on others? — David R. Hawkins

There is a level of consciousness between sleeping and fully wakening when the worries of the day have not settled upon us; the body is stilled, and the senses wholly receptive. If the sun is bright, there is pure silence, or the birds are beginning to sing, this shining level of consciousness can come to be the nearest we will get to paradise this side of our quietus, Every day should begin so, This is no dream. This is the reality. The world outside is beautiful. We do our best to hide it. We cover it. We push it father back. The ugliness we make ourselves. We originate our own worries. We put on our own shackles; build our prisons. We can only glimpse the golden reality, briefly, through our tiny barred windows. — John Wyatt

We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking. — Ursula K. Le Guin

All the laws of Nature exist inside us, and if we don't find them inside ourselves we will never find them outside. — Samael Aun Weor

The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life. — William Barrett

The idea of salvation through some one or some thing outside of ourselves came from love of inertia. We want God or his Son to save us. We thought that Hapi would give us immortality if we flattered his vanity by praying to him. — Alice Moore Hubbard

We ourselves need love; it's not only society, the world outside, that needs love. But we can't expect that love to come from outside of us. We should ask the question whether we are capable of loving ourselves as well as others. — Nhat Hanh

Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside. — Lawren Harris

We fear more than the loss of anything else the disappearance of possessions that have remained outside ourselves, because our hearts have not taken possession of them. — Marcel Proust

Most people think of love as some sort of power outside of themselves that will "take them away from all of this." Sadly, this is not the case. Love exists only within our own hearts, and to have happy relationships we must first become truly loving people. And as we fill our hearts with love by expressing love for others in thought, word, and deed ("acting as if" until we make it happen if necessary), that love can heal our own lives, help to solve our problems, and enable us to feel good about ourselves. — John Templeton

Chacun peut e prouver en soi ce double mouvement: de s ir de s'inte grer a' la socie te , besoin de se re aliser par soi-me me en dehors d'elle. We all have this double impulse within ourselves: the desire to integrate into society, and the need to fulfil ourselves outside of it, through our own efforts. — Nathalie Sarraute

When we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness - the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging. When we spend a lifetime trying to distance ourselves from the parts of our lives that don't fit with who we think we're supposed to be, we stand outside of our story and hustle for our worthiness by constantly performing, perfecting, pleasing, and proving. Our sense of worthiness - that critically important piece that gives us access to love and belonging - lives inside of our story. — Brene Brown

Know thyself! This is the source of all wisdom, said the great thinkers of the past, and the sentence was written in golden letters on the temple of the gods. To know himself, Linnaeus declared to be the essential indisputable distinction of man above all other creatures. I know, indeed, in study nothing more worthy of free and thoughtful man than the study of himself. For if we look for the purpose of our existence, we cannot possibly find it outside ourselves. We are here for our own sake. — Karl Ernst Von Baer

Funny thing about life, it's so easy to view it from the outside in. We can see the exact point where our friends fuck up, do the wrong thing, are blind to what's right in front of them. As in, why the fuck won't they just listen to us and take our advice instead of bumbling all over the place? We watch horror movies and know when to shout at the dumb girl who goes in the basement to investigate that noise; we revel in her stupidity, feel superior to it. If it were us, we assure ourselves, we wouldn't be so stupid. Sure we would; we just wouldn't realize the danger. Because the truth is, we're walking deaf, dumb, and blind half of the time. And even though I can tell myself this afterward, after I fuck up, it doesn't make me feel any better. Because I'm about to do a fuck up royale. With cheese. — Kristen Callihan

Sometimes we need to heed our fears and negative thoughts, and at all times we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves, even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining the views of "negative" people. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I think it's a part of us as human beings that we search outside of ourselves for meaning. — Nick Cave

Outside the cage, in the bullshit society we've created for ourselves, the truth is sometimes hard to see. But inside the octagon, with a crowd screaming for blood, and the smell of sweat and fear in the air, the truth is facing you, as clear as day. If you're the fastest, the quickest, the smartest, and you don't lose your cool, you'll survive. You'll be the victor. — Ozlo Grey

Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to get outside ourselves. And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from that itching, a minute's profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement. — John Galsworthy

When one considers the body in relation to dance, it is then that one truly realizes what suffering is: it is a part of our lives. No matter how much we search for it from the outside there is no way we can find it without delving into ourselves. — Tatsumi Hijikata

One of the most persistent of all delusions is the conviction that the source of our dissatisfaction lies outside ourselves. — B. Alan Wallace

A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves — Irvin D. Yalom

A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves. — Jane Hirshfield

The reason we might lose love is because we are always looking outside of us, thinking that the object or action of love is out there. That is why we allow the love, the harmony, the mature understanding, to slip away from ourselves. — Nhat Hanh

To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews , and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance. — Eric Hoffer

In the last 25 years, we've convinced ourselves and a majority of the country that women can do what men can do. Now we have to convince the majority of the country - and ourselves - that men can do what women can do ... Let's face it: until men are fully equal inside the home, women will never be really equal outside it. — Gloria Steinem

We live in a society in which it seems that every space, every moment must be 'filled' with initiatives, activity, sound; often there is not even time to listen and dialogue ... Let us not be afraid to be silent outside and inside ourselves, so that we are able not only to perceive God's voice, but also the voice of the person next to us, the voices of others. — Pope Benedict XVI

That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves — C. G. Jung

Even with the desire for a better life, we can be reluctant to do the work of boundaries because it will be a war. The battle falls into two categories: outside resistance we get from others and the resistance we get from ourselves. — Henry Cloud

The more we grow in love and virtue and holiness, the more we see love and virtue and holiness outside. All condemnation of others really condemns ourselves. Adjust the microcosm (which is in your power to do) and the macrocosm will adjust itself for you. It is like the hydrostatic paradox, one drop of water can balance the universe. — Swami Vivekananda

We have a lot of property and we take care of it mostly ourselves, so that's what I spend a lot of time doing, which I love because I'm outside. — Mary Decker

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die. — Mortimer J. Adler

The more isolated and disconnected we are, the more shattered and distorted our self-identity. We are not healthy when we are alone. We find ourselves when we connect to others. Without community we don't know who we are ...
When we live outside of healthy community, we not only lose others. We lose ourselves ... Who we understand ourselves to be is dramatically affected for better or worse by those we hold closest to us. — Erwin Raphael McManus

We change our opinions of ourselves so often. What the outside world thinks is only a small part of our image. — Carly Simon

It is our very search for perfection outside of ourselves that causes suffering. — Gautama Buddha

Often, we feel that we need a leader outside of ourselves -a Buddha, a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, Jr.- to show the way. But we have the Buddha inside of us. We have Gandhi and King inside of us as well. We are interconnected. We don't need to wait for some other person to be the change we want to see in the world — Nhat Hanh

In our patakis, our folk myths, we believe that we come to the world with a destiny we picked for ourselves in Arun. Obatala creates the human body, but you have to get your head from the potter who molds them out of clay in his warehouse. On a good day he makes beautiful heads, but sometimes he gets drunk and makes a bad head. It's a divine defect. There's no way to tell from the outside, but once you've chosen your head, you have to live your destiny. — Lauren Beukes

But how do you protect yourself against an enemy you cannot see? How do you combat a thing that only threatens but never really comes? And so it came to pass in those days of quiet that we ceased to fight an outside foe and began to fight ourselves. — Cameron Dokey

In order to change, however, you have to be willing to acknowledge the need for change - in other words, you have to come to terms with the fact that everything in your life isn't perfect. There is this concept - among not just Scientologists, but everyone - that we are all supposed to have it together. Whether it's our work, love lives, family relationships, or even feelings about ourselves, we need to present this idealized image to others. We are so conditioned when asked "How are you?" to say "Good" or "Great." But why not "I don't know. I hate everyone today." Why are we so scared to be judged imperfect or to talk about how we really feel? To be authentic? If we can just tell each other how and what we are really doing, step outside of what we believe others think we should be, the result can be therapeutic. — Leah Remini

Not really, definitely not from any outside sources. If there was any pressure it was just from ourselves. We just wanted to make sure that what we were doing was right. But, you know, when you're dealing with any kind of art, I think pressure really doesn't help at all. All you can do is give what comes out of you - and that's what we did. — Chris Hesse

Kirtan is for all people. There are no experts, no beginners. The practice itself is the teacher, guiding us to ourselves. Kirtan allows us to enter into a mystery world-a world where all the logic of our minds, all the condition and learning are left outside. And in this mystery, we create a temple inside of our hearts, a place of refuge, a place of love, a place of just being. — Jai Uttal

We revolutionary anarchists are the enemies of all forms of State and State organisations ... we
think that all State rule, all governments being by their very nature placed outside the mass of the
people, must necessarily seek to subject it to customs and purposes entirely foreign to it. We
therefore declare ourselves to be foes ... of all State organisations as such, and believe that the
people can only be happy and free, when, organised from below by means of its own autonomous
and completely free associations, without the supervision of any guardians, it will create its own
life. — Mikhail Bakunin

Does evil come from inside ,from the dark depths of the human soul or does it come from outside ,from the objective conditions of human life?
This question divides all people into two large groups: believers and materialists. For believers all evil and good is in man. Hence denying violence because it's directed toward the outside, is a fight with an imaginary, nonexistent evil. Violence should be directed toward ourselves, inside, in the form of repentance or asceticism.
To assert that evil is outside, that a man is evil because the conditions in which he lives are bad, that changes in these conditions would bring changes in man,to insist that man is a result of outside circumstances, is from the religious point of view the most godless and the most inhuman idea which has ever appeared in the human mind. Such an opinion degrades man to a thing, to a helpless executor of outside, mechanical, unconscious forces. — Alija Izetbegovic

We can enjoy a self-assurance that doesn't depend on the state of things outside ourselves, be it downturns or booms or whatever. — Desmond Tutu

Very often it has come to my mind what men of learning there were formerly throughout England..and how nowadays...we would have to seek them outside...Thanks be to God Almighty that we now have any supply of teachers at all!...As often as you can, free yourself from worldly affairs so that you may apply that wisdom which God gave you wherever you can. Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves didn't cherish learning nor transmit it to other men. — King Alfred The Great

I'm talking about equalizing the pressure between outer actions and events which are shattering and devastating to us and then the place where we recompose and reconstruct ourselves, where we finally achieve what Jung called the second birth. The second birth is the one that you can make, and the discovery of that to me was always a great relief. As long as we expect the changes to come only from the outside or from action outside or from political systems, then we are bound to feel helpless, to feel sometimes that reality is bigger and stronger than we are. But if suddenly we begin to feel that there is one person we can change, simultaneously we change many people around us. And as a writer I suddenly discovered the enormous radius of influence that one person can have. — Anais Nin

Integrity is the value we set on ourselves. It is a fulfillment of the duty we owe ourselves. An honorable man or woman will personally commit to live up to certain self-imposed expectations. They need no outside check or control. They are honorable in their inner core. — James E. Faust

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves. — Bill Viola

As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other. — Audre Lorde

If we choose to learn and grow from the things that happen to us, is it even necessary to guess at why they happened? What's a more productive use of our energy - searching for meaning outside ourselves or creating meaning within ourselves? — Lori Deschene

Because we have a natural tendency to look within ourselves for the basis of God's approval or disapproval, we must make a conscious daily effort to look outside ourselves to the righteousness of Christ, then to stand in the present reality of our justification. — Jerry Bridges

In the end, there wasn't a right thing to say, only a right thing to do. So I sat further up on the bed and put my hand on Manuelle's cheek and our mouths did the rest, finding each other even though our eyes were closed. I ceased to care about anything that wasn't her body or mine as we wrapped ourselves around each other on the flower patterned quilt and I was closer to her than I'd ever been before. It wasn't that we left the
rest of the world behind; it was the opposite. I could feel the world turning underneath us, I could hear birds outside and people laughing, and I felt that I was
part of it at last. With no part of my skin not touching Manuelle's, I was part of the world at last. Or maybe I'm romanticizing, and we were just two kids doing everything two kids can do in a cramped room at the back of a caravan. — Chloe Rattray

A perfect life is a contradiction in terms. Life itself is a state of continuous struggle between ourselves and everything outside. Every moment we are fighting actually with external nature, and if we are defeated, our life has to go. — Swami Vivekananda

Stepping back and connecting reconciliation to God's story also helps us move away from dramatic visions of fixing the world, as if our job were to provide solutions to problems outside us. If Christians believe anything, it is that no one - including ourselves and the church - is separate from the brokenness as an untainted solution to the problems of our world. The new creation contends with the old. The dividing line between good and evil runs straight through each one of us. So the journey of reconciliation begins with a transformation of the human person. — Chris Rice

We must never fear robbers or murderers. They are dangers from outside, small dangers. It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, vice the real murderer. Why should we be troubled by a threat to our person or our pocket? What we have to beware of is the threat to our souls'. — Victor Hugo

The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance ... something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order. — Julio Cortazar

Fear of the self... of both what we show the world on the outside and that which we know, ourselves, to truly be on the inside, can be a paralyzing notion. — Joe Harris

It is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbor, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods-you have nothing but images. The images create the space between you and what you observe and in that space there is conflict, so what we are going to find out now together is whether it is possible to be free of the space we create, not only outside ourselves but in ourselves, the space which divides people in all their relationships ... — Jiddu Krishnamurti

We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.. — Marcel Proust

Man does not limit himself to seeing; he thinks and insists on learning the meaning of phenomena whose existence has been revealed to him by observation. So he reasons, compares facts, puts questions to them, and by the answers which he extracts, tests one by another. This sort of control, by means of reasoning and facts, is what constitutes experiment, properly speaking; and it is the only process that we have for teaching ourselves about the nature of things outside us. — Claude Bernard

We find or invent the cleverest means of attributing our sins to anything or anyone outside of ourselves. — Paul Washer

Those who hope for purity and righteousness always try and destroy that which disturbs them. They think the disturbance comes from outside themselves. This is a serious problem. Wars, suicide bombings, and all sorts of other nasty things start from the premise that we can destroy "evil" outside ourselves without dealing with the evil within. — Brad Warner

Gamache knew people were like homes. Some were cheerful and bright, some gloomy. Some could look good on the outside but feel wretched on the interior. And some of the least attractive homes, from the outside, were kindly and warm inside.
He also knew the first few rooms were for public consumption. It was only in going deeper that he'd find the reality. And finally, inevitably, there was the last room, the one we keep locked, and bolted and barred, even from ourselves. Especially from ourselves. — Louise Penny

Nothing existed outside ourselves and school. For us, the world of politics, social revolution, the war in Vietnam never happened. — Rachel Klein

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.
Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.
The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.
The camera obscura.
Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down. — Chuck Palahniuk

There is a missionary spirit - a spirit which urges us to live outside ourselves and to be concerned for the welfare of others. — Carlos E. Asay

I'm not sure anyone's ever experienced enlightenment, been born again, been called to repentance or decided to sell their belongings on account of a system. The voice, the tale, the image, the parable that gets through to you
that wins your heart
religiously is the one that makes it past your defenses. You've been won over, and you probably didn't see it coming. You've been enlisted into a drama, whether positively or negatively, and it shouldn't be controversial to note that it happens all the time. When you really think about it, there's one waiting around every corner. It's as near as the story, song or image you can't get out of your head. Religion happens when we get pulled in, moved, called out or compelled by something outside ourselves. It could be a car commercial, a lyric, a painting, a theatrical performance or the magnetic pull of an Apple store. The calls to worship are everywhere. — David Dark

For over twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

But whatever the academic debate on the topic, Nixon was correct that black Americans "don't want to be a colony in a nation." And yet he helped bring about that very thing. Over the half-century since he delivered those words, we have built a colony in a nation, not in the classic Marxist sense but in the deep sense we can appreciate as a former colony ourselves: A territory that isn't actually free. A place controlled from outside rather than within. A place where the mechanisms of representation don't work enough to give citizens a sense of ownership over their own government. A place where the law is a tool of control rather than a foundation for prosperity. A political regime like the one our Founders inherited and rejected. An order they spilled their blood to defeat. THIS — Chris Hayes