Quotes & Sayings About Perception Of Self

Don't try to change the world.
First, change yourself or rather, your self-perception, and you find the world automatically corresponding to the level of your understanding.
You will find that it has always been you who set the pace and depth of your experience by recognizing and honoring your true nature. — Mooji

The Self alone exists. When you try to trace the ego, which is the basis of the perception of the world and everything else, you find the ego does not exist at all and neither does all this creation that you see. — Ramana Maharshi

Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people's perception of the gospel. — Alan Hirsch

I'll tell you what's real. Real is that I was in jail for the past year, rooming with drug dealers and eating crap food your dog wouldn't touch. Real is not being able to wear your own frickin' underwear and showering with twenty-five other dicks every day while guards watch. Real is my next-door neighbor who walks like she's balancing on stilts because her leg is so fucked up from the accident. Brian, your perception of reality is totally off. — Simone Elkeles

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion. — Robert Burns

I am fond of reminding my yoga students of the saying "It takes one to know one" when they become lost I condemnation and judgment of others. The world that we perceive is a reflection of our own states of mind and reveals our own level of consciousness. The world is little more than a Rorschach blot in which we see our own desire systems projected. We see what we want to see. (116) — Prem Prakash

Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
All language can register is the slow return
to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
and habit blurs perception and language
takes up its routine flourishes. — Anne Carson

As with all young ones, a deeper perception comes clearer with time... Roe'vaash recieved the grace to release the anger and pain he had carried and suffered for so long... — K. Farrell St. Germain

Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence. — Olaf Stapledon

But the final price of freedom is the willingness to face that most frightening of all beings, one's own self. Starlight vision, the "other way of knowing," is the mode of perception of the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind. The depths of our own beings are not all sunlit; to see clearly, we must be willing to dive into the dark, inner abyss and acknowledge the creatures we may find there. For, as Jungian analyst M. Esther Harding explains in Woman's Mysteries, "These subjective factors ... are potent psychical entities, they belong to the totality of our being, they cannot be destroyed. So long as they are unrecognized outcasts from our conscious life, they will come between us and all the objects we view, and our whole world will be either distorted or illuminated. — Starhawk

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

There is an inherent unity and harmony in the universe. The divisions and disharmony we find on earth are created by the perception of separateness that people developed over a period of time. — Thomas Vazhakunnathu

the job of the brain is to constantly monitor and evaluate what is going on within and around us. These evaluations are transmitted by chemical messages in the bloodstream and electrical messages in our nerves, causing subtle or dramatic changes throughout the body and brain. These shifts usually occur entirely without conscious input or awareness: The subcortical regions of the brain are astoundingly efficient in regulating our breathing, heartbeat, digestion, hormone secretion, and immune system. However, these systems can become overwhelmed if we are challenged by an ongoing threat, or even the perception of threat. This accounts for the wide array of physical problems researchers have documented in traumatized people. Yet our conscious self also plays a vital role in maintaining our inner equilibrium: We need to register and act on our physical sensations to keep our bodies safe. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

You know what awareness is only when you are aware. Awareness is the perception of your presence in the now. — Ilchi Lee

This just makes me know and understand that there is no one reality that suits all; just one that suits each of us. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Canada may be fast-forwarding, jump starting, into a new pattern, a model of communication linkages, a civilization that is more than a grab for power and dominance, a place that could channel the fires of the global wirings, where political alliances are subject to electrical ebb and flow, and the alchemical cultivations of imagination and perception, of the self, could precail of the ideology of capital. — B.W. Powe

Yoga does not always cure stress. It neutralizes it through increasing awareness and by changing self-perception. — Debasish Mridha

When the mind sees itself in the mirror of relationship, from that perception there is self-knowledge. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

An indoor (or backseat) childhood does reduce some dangers to children; but other risks are heightened, including risks to physical and psychological health, risk to children's concept and perception of community, risk to self-confidence and the ability to discern true danger — Richard Louv

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona. — Richard Rohr

Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty. — Mark Twain

What is happiness? Happiness is freedom. What is freedom? Freedom is the ability to live without fear of public perception; to be who you are no matter where you are. — Kaiylah Muhammad

When we find delight in another person, we've actually found something joyful inside ourselves that involves a shift in our awareness, a shift in our perception, because the same person is not necessarily attractive to other people.In relationship, whenever we're drawn to someone or repelled by someone, they're both mirrors of the self. We're attracted to people in whom we find traits that we want or desire in our own selves. And we are repelled by people in whom we find traits that we're denying in ourselves. So relationship is a true mirror of where we are in our evolution in consciousness. — Deepak Chopra

Complex PTSD consists of of six symptom clusters, which also have been described in terms of dissociation of personality. Of course, people who receive this diagnosis often also suffer from other problems as well, and as noted earlier, diagnostic categories may overlap significantly. The symptom clusters are as follows:
Alterations in Regulation of Affect ( Emotion ) and Impulses
Changes in Relationship with others
Somatic Symptoms
Changes in Meaning
Changes in the perception of Self
Changes in Attention and Consciousness — Suzette Boon

Forgiveness has nothing to do with absolving a criminal of his crime. It has everything to do with relieving oneself of the burden of being a victim
letting go of the pain and transforming oneself from victim to survivor. — C.R. Strahan

Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so to the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation. — Ernest Becker

For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. — Richard K. Morgan

Although we have refined our behavior over many centuries, the basic perception that we are individual beings, separate from the rest of the world, remains unchanged, and so how we relate to the world remains unchanged. Because separation is an illusion, control is also an illusion. — Ilchi Lee

You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it. — Wilhelm Reich

Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble ... [It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality ... a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict. — Eugene H. Peterson

Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role ... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences. — Nick Harkaway

I think we start suffering as soon as we come out of the womb. I think that people tend to stereotype. When they think of suffering, they think of abuse - physical abuse, emotional abuse, poverty, that kind of thing. There's different levels of suffering. I don't think that it has to do with how much money you have - if you were raised in the ghetto or the Hamptons. For me it's more about perception: self-perception and how you perceive the world. — Lucinda Williams

When you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women ... And I don't quite know how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in women brings only shame? — Moderata Fonte

In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home. — Barbara Hurd

He wasn't so elderly after all, I saw: probably just a few years older than I. And yet I was never able (and am still not) to think of myself as old. I talked as if I knew I was; I bemoaned my age. But it was only for comedy, or to make other people feel young. — Hanya Yanagihara

What do you mean, Phib? asked Miss Squeers, looking in her own little glass, where, like most of us, she saw - not herself, but the reflection of some pleasant image in her own brain. — Charles Dickens

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of attitude. — Katherine Mansfield

Thoreau and Huxley calmly state what I have spent years trying to articulate, and never found the words for doing so. To read the words of these great men is to read the highest expression of my very self which is inexpressible due to the shortcomings of my particular nature. — Chris Matakas

Perceptions are not reality. How you perceive your life, your value, and your destiny doesn't give you the whole picture. You may be seeing yourself and your significance dimly. But your self-perception determines in large measure the way your life will go ... It is vital that those deep questions at the core of your being are answered with truth. Dim or mistaken perceptions that aren't in keeping with reality must be challenged and corrected by the light of God's Word. — Chip Ingram

A more truthful perception may be seen from the perspective of the whole - what we really are, beyond names, roles, education, religion and other information added to our true nature. — Ilchi Lee

Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others' reasons for action, or the basis of others' emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers. — Terri E Apter

In order to break your child's negative cycle, you must first break your own cycle of negative perception. You must take on a strengths-based perspective. Look for the good, which in some cases may require you to get creative. Do this even when it's hard. This sends a powerful message to children even when they are behaving poorly. You are sending the message that you believe in them, you see that there is more to them than their bad behavior, and you are painting a future picture of what they can become. — Daniel Bates

I suddenly became strangely inebriated. The external world
became changed as in a dream. Objects appeared to gain inrelief;
they assumed unusual dimensions; and colors became more glowing.
Even self-perception and the sense of time were changed. When the
eyes were closed, colored pictures flashed past in a quickly changing
kaleidoscope. After a few hours, the not unpleasant inebriation,
which had been experienced whilst I was fully conscious, disappeared.
what had caused this condition? — Albert Hofmann

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else. — Nick Harkaway

Whatever you see when you look at your self will be the reflection of your inner perception. — Debasish Mridha

Positive transference is then further divisible into transference of friendly or affectionate feelings which are admissible to consciousness and transference of prolongation of those feelings into the consciousness and transference of prolongations of those feelings into the unconscious. As regards the latter, analysis shows that they invariably go back to erotic sources. And we are thus led to the discovery that all the emotional relations of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good account in our lives, are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from purely sexual desires through a softening of their sexual aim, however pure and unsensual they may appear to our conscious self-perception. Originally we knew only sexual objects; and psychoanalysis shows us that people who in our real life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects for our unconscious — Sigmund Freud

So much of western self-perception and intellectual worldview has been shaped by the moral rhetoric of the Cold War, the discourse in which communism featured as a clear enemy, determined to rule the world. — Pankaj Mishra

As you heal, you see yourself more realistically. You accept that you are a person with strengths and weaknesses. You make the changes you can in your life and let go of the things that aren't in your power to change. You learn that every part of you is valuable. And you realize that all of your thoughts and feelings are important, even when they're painful or difficult. — Ellen Bass

Self is the perception of perception. Beyond self there's no perception of perception. — Frederick Lenz

I know how mirrors work. They're all in league with the cosmetics trade. They tell a woman lies. Drawing her gaze from one imagined flaw to another, until all she sees is a constellation of imperfections. If you could get outside yourself, borrow my eyes for just an instant ... There is only beauty. — Tessa Dare

Through the doors of perception, down the corridors of uncertainty, and into the room of self doubt, opens the window of opportunity. — David Parker

My ego mind - my own self-hatred masquerading as self-love - would point me always in the direction of fear, luring me toward the blaming thought, the attack or defense, the perception of guilt in myself or others. — Marianne Williamson

What I teach is a process of becoming a soulmaker. Soulmaking, as John Keats noted, is the work of creating our unique bliss. In this process, we liberate our creativity and our joy, our power and our purpose. We become imaginatively rich and spiritually vibrant. The interesting thing about soulmaking is that everyone craves it- an enlarged imaginative perception of themselves and the world, a deeper emotional connection to their own heart and to the hearts of others, a wilder capacity for joy- and yet we have almost no societally sanctioned space for this endeavor. — Carolyn Elliott

Let the spirit out - Discard all thoughts of reward, all hopes of praise and fears of blame, all awareness of one's bodily self. And, finally closing the avenues of sense perception, let the spirit out, as it will. — Bruce Lee

The Beautiful is the expression of the absolute Spirit, which is truth itself. This region of Divine truth as artistically presented to perception and feeling, forms the center of the whole world of Art. It is a self-contained, free, divine formation which has completely appropriated the elements of external form as material, and which employs them only as the means of manifesting itself. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

People don't act the way they do because of me. They just act out their own projection of reality, and so do I. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Dissociation, in a general sense, refers to a rigid separation of parts of experiences, including somatic experiences, consciousness, affects, perception, identity, and memory. When there is a structural dissociation, each of the dissociated self-states has at least a rudimentary sense of "I" (Van der Hart et al., 2004). In my view, all of the environmentally based "psychopathology" or problems in living can be seen through this lens. — Elizabeth F. Howell

With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Your observations and conclusions are mirrored illusions of your inner state of being, teaching you truth through falsehoods, strength through weakness and clarity through confusion. You are seeing your Self now, disguised as the world through a lens of denial, but you will soon come to realize that what you choose to deny in yourself manifests into your world. The flaws you see in your world are your most powerful teachers. — Ka Chinery

The simple, brief experience of imagining oneself as another transformed both self-perception and, through this transformation, behavior. The maxim "fake it till you make it" gains empirical support. — Cordelia Fine

Self-realization is largely a matter of achieving a person's formative personality definition. People whom lack self-realization oftentimes fail to integrate their desired personality traits into all phases of their life including social life, family life, and work life. In order to achieve satisfaction with oneself, a person must know what they wish for, know how to go about achieving their goals, be capable of recognizing where they now stand, and understand how they must change in order to attain their ultimate visage. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Perception is the ability to be conscious of self and that which is other than self. Without thinking about it, a distinction is made between who we are and what we perceive. — Frederick Lenz

Anita Johnston, Ph.D., author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, taught me to look in the mirror with curiosity rather than fear. So I may look at my reflection and think, 'That's interesting. I wonder why my body seems bigger today than it did yesterday. Maybe it's water weight. Maybe it's my outfit. Or maybe my eyes are just playing tricks on me.' I know it's not possible for me to gain a noticeable amount of weight overnight, so I will go no further than that. I move on with my day without skipping a beat - and definitely without missing a meal. — Jenni Schaefer

Discipline is the greatest weapon against the self-righteous. We must measure the virtue of our own controlled response when answering the atrocities of fanatics. And yet, let it not be claimed, in our own oratory of piety, that we are without our own fanatics; for the self-righteous breed wherever tradition holds, and most often when there exists the perception that tradition is under assault. Fanatics can be created as easily in an environment of moral decay (whether real or imagined) as in an environment of legitimate inequity or under the banner of a common cause.
Discipline is as much facing the enemy within as the enemy before you; for without critical judgment, the weapon you wield delivers- and let us not be coy here- naught but murder.
And its first victim is the moral probity of your cause. — Steven Erikson

The education situation which most effectively promotes significant learning is one in which (1) threat to the self of the learner is reduced to a minimum and (2) differential perception of the field of experience is facilitated — Carl Rogers

The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary. — Aldous Huxley

Dear God, Please lift me above the shadows Of my negative self-perception. Please deliver me of the chains That keep me bound to a smaller life. Please show me the beauty You have placed in me, And give me faith that it is there. Amen. — Marianne Williamson

But I never looked like that!' - How do you know? What is the 'you' you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images. — Roland Barthes

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence
but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson
that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them. — Naomi Wolf

People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one's perception of reality, a barrier which Buddhism calls the attachment to the false view of self.
Attachment to the false view of self means belief in the presence of unchanging entities which exist on their own. — Thich Nhat Hanh

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise. — Leland Ryken

My perception of my life crashed from high tragedy to juvenile self-pity in a matter of moments. — Robin Hobb

All these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust — Nathanael West

Focus forward, not around you.
In the moment;
Not behind you.
Don't grimace in the whys,
Relish in 'Yes-es;' - Be Positive ...
When you amplify the goods,
you'll see bads as infinitesimally minuscule.
Glorify and Cleanse ... first and foremost ,
YOUR perception.
#levitate — Tiffany Luard

The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessy happy, weren't they? To Kristy this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn't blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness. — Clive Barker

He was too many things at once - a boy, a man, and everything in between - and the differing parts of himself seldom came into balance. She found him attractive in that way. Yet the perception saddened her: she herself wasn't too many things, but too few. — Stephen R. Donaldson

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, "This ... this ... "; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos. — Paul Goodman

When you're very young and you're different, you begin to believe that no one has ever been as different as you and that no one has ever felt that difference as keenly as you. — B.R. Sanders

When you take a moment to peel back the layers of time and space in your current state of perception, you soon begin to realize the true nature of the self and it's reality. Increasing your self-awareness naturally fosters compassion and integrity in all actions and attitudes towards oneself and others — Gary Hopkins

Intuition is not a different dimension of perception, as people usually try to make out. Intuition is just a quicker way of arriving at the same answer. Intuition is just a way of making use of the data and jumping the steps. — Sadhguru

It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good heart whatever they might have to say. — Mahatma Gandhi

The outer expression of a person often reflects the inner perception and deeper beliefs. — Debasish Mridha

But I was coming to learn that much of your perception of a relationship is shaped by everything else that happens to be going on in your life at the time. When I first met Ed Farley, I had been starved for love. He was the first man I'd ever known to show me kindness. Hr had taken my loneliness away. And for that I knew I would always be grateful. But being grateful was not enough of a reason to stay with someone. — Patricia Park

I just have one of those faces. People come up to me and say, 'What's wrong?' Nothing. 'Well, it takes more energy to frown than it does to smile.' Yeah, you know it takes more energy to point that out than it does to leave me alone? — Bill Hicks

The mind wants to land, to fixate, to hold a concept, but the only way you can be really free is by not fixating. That's part of true maturity, and it's one of the hardest things for spiritual people who have had true and powerful revelations to go through - to accept the degree of surrender needed to literally let go of all experience and all self-reference. Even in great revelations, there is almost always something that wants to claim, "I am this." Every time you claim, "I am this", you just claimed another sense perception, thought, emotion, or feeling. — Adyashanti

Failure can only exist from stagnant perceptions. Everything is a process of learning and if you learn something useful, you have success. — Michael Arndt

Fundamentally there is just open space, the basic ground, what we really are. Our most fundamental state of mind, before the creation of ego, is such that there is basic openness, basic freedom, a spacious quality; and we have now and have always had this openness. Take, for example, our everyday lives and thought patterns. When we see an object, in the first instant there is a sudden perception which has no logic or conceptualization to it at all; we just perceive the thing in the open ground. Then immediately we panic and begin to rush about trying to add something to it, either trying to find a name for it or trying to find pigeonholes in which we could locate and categorize it. Gradually things develop from there. This development does not take the shape of a solid entity. Rather, this development is illusory, the mistaken belief in a "self" or "ego." Confused mind is inclined to view itself as a solid, ongoing thing, but it is only a collection of tendencies, events. — Chogyam Trungpa

You look up for a moment and you're not sure which life is real. You've split yourself into so many honeycombed parts that they barely notice each other---all of them pacing, concurrently, parallel streams of though, and each one thinks of its self as me. — Dan Chaon

The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in living
creatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were in
repose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless. — Aldous Huxley

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, the candle is the egoism of any party now absent. — George Eliot

The fact is that we have no way of knowing if the person who we think we are is at the core of our being. Are you a decent girl with the potential to someday become an evil monster, or are you an evil monster that thinks it's a decent girl?"
"Wouldn't I know which one I was?"
"Good God, no. The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves. — Derek Landy

All emotions have an opposite. Anger and sadness are two of the same. When someone is angry, when they calm down, you may discover they're actually sad about some part in their life. Do you know what the other side of envy is?"
I shook my head.
"It's a lack of confidence, self-esteem. If he envies Silas's strength, then he's unsure about his own. If he's envious of Victor's wealth and what he can give you, it's because he's insecure about his lack of money and ability to give you those material things. Gabriel's greatest weakness is his own perception of himself. — C.L.Stone

I'm actually much more shy and self-conscious than people's perception of me. — Jonathan Ames

Believe it or not, I'm stronger than any belief, stereotype, profile, or idea you have of me. I'm driven and self-made with a perception unique to my own. You'll hate that and say I'm not special. I'll allow you to believe it because deep down, you already know I am. My name's Charles Lee. Bound for greatness. Destined to soar. — Charles Lee

Insights are everything. They play central parts in the actualization of destiny. A dangerous insights becomes a colossal executioner. Latching your fate with noble thoughts spares you a life of self-limitation. — Darmie Orem

My job is not to worry about what everyone else thinks about me but to discover what I think. If I actually want to know what someone else thinks, my job is then to ask that person. More often than not, however, it isn't important to know. It's okay if people are mad at me, and it's okay if people think I'm a complete idiot - as long as I'm doing my best. Just because certain people might have judgments about me, it does not mean they have authority over me. To truly form my own life, I had to ask questions like 'What are my needs? And 'What are my thoughts?' I had to acknowledge both my strengths and my weaknesses. I had to form my own opinions based on my reality instead of someone else's. — Jenni Schaefer

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us. — Harold Bloom

Eating a RAW food lifestyle is the purest and best way to live. Many of the strongest and longest living animals are raw, such as the panda bear and gorillas. Self love has brought me to a RAW lifestyle. Feeding my body with pure natural energy. Most people's perception is what has been ingrained inside them by manipulation, but slowly there is a shift in consciousness, one person at a time. People will ask more questions, begin to stand up for themselves, go their "own way", take better care of themselves, which will benefit everyone and everything around them. — Eric Nies

I think things changed as a result of a certain perception of our politics. When we went through our zealous, self-righteous period it didn't exactly win us any friends. — Fred Frith