Senses Of Self Quotes & Sayings

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. — Azar Nafisi

My desire goes elsewhere: I dream of a form of life - though I must confess I do not see it clearly as yet - in which the entire man, spirit and flesh, would strive after a deeper and deeper fulfillment of his Self - in which the spirit and the senses would not be enemies to one another, and in which man could achieve unity within himself and with the meaning of his destiny, so that on the summit of his days he could say, "I am my destiny. — Muhammad Asad

We should self-examine and talk about things like our own white privilege and these phony senses of being an artist. — Geoff Rickly

The peculiar, withdrawn attitude of the philosopher, world denying, hostile to life, suspicious of the senses, freed from sensuality, which has been maintained down to the most modern times and has become virtually the philosopher's pose par excellence - is above all a result of the emergency conditions under which philosophy arose and survived at all; for the longest time, philosophy would not have been possible at all on earth without ascetic wraps and cloaks, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding. To put it vividly: the ascetic priest provided until the most modern times the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar form in which alone the philosopher could live and creep about. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What we talk about less often, because it is harder to explain, is the way a perfume can give breath and body to the phantom selves that waft about us as we go through our days -- not just the showgirl, the femme fatale, and the ingenue, but all the memories and dreams of the taller, meaner, sharper, sweeter, softer people we have been or long to be. — Alyssa Harad

Freedom from activity is never achieved by abstaining from action. Nobody can become perfect by merely ceasing to act. In fact, nobody can ever rest from his activity even for a moment. All are helplessly forced to act ...
A man who renounces certain physical actions but still lets his mind dwell on the objects of his sensual desire, is deceiving himself. He can only be called a hypocrite. The truly admirable man controls his senses by the power of his will. All his actions will be disinterested.
Activity is better than inertia. Act, but with self-control. If you are lazy, you cannot even sustain your own body. — Anonymous

What is meditation? What is leaving one's body? What is fasting? What is holding one's breath? It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice-wine or fermented coconut-milk. Then he won't feel his self any more, then he won't feel the pains of life any more, then he finds a short numbing of the senses. When he falls asleep over his bowl of rice-wine, he'll find the same what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape their bodies through long exercises, staying in the non-self. — Hermann Hesse

The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps ...
In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it.
The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange. — Antonio R. Damasio

Why do we do it? What's in our brains that makes us suddenly want bad food when we're stressed?'
I've read that people use this sort of food to dull their senses. It basically pollutes your body so it isn't as sensitive and receptive to outside influences. So maybe that's it. It's a form of self-medication. Or self-dopification. — Joanne Schoenwald

The physical ego, the active consciousness in man, should uplift its body-identified self into unity with the soul, its true nature; it should not allow itself to remain mired in the lowly delusive strata of the senses and material entanglement. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Know thou the self (spirit) as riding in a chariot, The body as the chariot. Know thou the intellect as the chariot-driver, And the mind as the reins. The senses, they say, are the horses; The objects of sense, what they range over. The self combined with senses and mind Wise men call the enjoyer. — Albert Pike

There are two aspects to this world; even though it is fickle, it is within principle. Through the medium of the five senses and intellectual knowledge, it appears fickle and through 'Gnan' (Real Knowledge) it appears to be within principle. — Dada Bhagwan

When I love God I love the beauty of bodies, the rhythm of movements, the shining of eyes, the embraces, the feelings, the scents, the sounds of all this protean creation. When I love you, my God, I want to embrace it all, for I love you with all my senses in the creations of your love. In all the things that encounter me, you are waiting for me.
For a long time I looked for you within myself and crept into the shell of my soul, shielding myself with an armour of inapproachability. But you were outside - outside myself - and enticed me out of the narrowness of my heart into the broad place of love for life. So I came out of myself and found my soul in my senses, and my own self in others. — Jurgen Moltmann

Have good sense, smell the scents, and you will have more cents — Sonya Withrow

When he has the power to see things detached from self-interest and from the insistent claims of the lust of the senses, then alone can he have the true vision of the beauty that is everywhere. — Rabindranath Tagore

When a man in the process of dreaming becomes conscious that he is dreaming, he is no longer identified with the phenomena; he is not affected exultantly or dolefully. God consciously dreams His cosmic play and is unaffected by it's dualities. A yogi who perceives his real self as separate from his active senses and their objects never becomes attached to anything. He is aware of the dream nature of the universe and watches it without being entangled in its complex but ephemeral nature. — Paramahansa Yogananda

When one's mind dwells on the objects of Senses, fondness for them grows on him, from fondness comes desire, from desire anger. Anger leads to bewilderment, bewilderment to loss of memory of true Self, and by that intelligence is destroyed, and with the destruction of intelligence he perishes. — Lord Krishna

If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation. — Vaclav Havel

I must exist in shadows, while you live under exquisitely blue skies, and yet I don't hate you for the freedom that you take for granted-although I do envy you.
I don't hate you because, after all, you are human, too, and therefore have limitations of your own. Perhaps you are homely, slow-witted or too smart for your own good, deaf or mute or blind, by nature given to despair or to self-hatred, or perhaps you are unusually fearful of Death himself. We all have burdens. On the other hand, if you are better-looking and smarter than I am, blessed with five sharp senses, even more optimistic than I am, with plenty of self-esteem, and if you also share my refusal to be humbled by the Reaper ... well, then I could almost hate you if I didn't know that, like all of us in this imperfect world, you also have a haunted heart and a mind troubled by grief, by loss, by longing. — Dean Koontz

As long as one sees faults with the world, he prevails in the knowledge of the senses. The inner purification has not yet occurred in him. — Dada Bhagwan

You intend to keep me confined in here with you for three days?" His voice was low and ominous.
"It doesn't have to take three days," she said, "It just depends how long it takes for you to come to your senses."
"My senses?" he shook her so hard she thought her teeth would rattle. "It is you whose mind is disordered if you think you can tame me like some pet! Is that what you think, Vesta? That you can somehow turn a man like me into your little lap dog?"
"No," she said, as earnest as she had ever been in her life. "I could never imagine you as a lap dog. Ever. You are a Mastiff. Big, powerful, dignified, brave, and yet gentle." She nodded with a look of self satisfaction. "Yes. Most definitely a Mastiff."
from THE VIRGIN HUNTRESS — Victoria Vane

Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself. — C.S. Lewis

Our sense of self, formulated in large part by the untold number of cross-related connections that we make with our physical, social, and family environments, is reliant upon fitting into our social fabric. The educational environment, family relationships, peer groups, books, television, films, music, along with an assortment of other cultural events shape our emergent persona. Our successes and failures interacting in the world leave their collective imprint upon the wet clay of our forming brains. We are sentimental creatures who cling to past memories. We are inquisitive critters who venture forth from our protective dens to explore new territory. We are perceptive organisms equipped with five basic senses. We are sentient beings who can consciously organize our sense impressions into guiding ideas and useful principles. Our survival responses form a central cord of our emotions. We are receptive, compassionate beings that respond with both body and mind to global stimuli. — Kilroy J. Oldster

So the force of the Self also travels through the psychic nerves and, pervading the entire body, imparts sentience to the senses, and that if this knot is cut, the Self will remain as it always is, without any attributes. — Ramana Maharshi

We grapple with this 'law of sin' (Rom. 8:2) and expel it from our body, establishing in its place the surveillance of the intellect. Through this surveillance we prescribe what is fitting for every faculty of the soul and every member of the body. For the senses we prescribe what they should take into account and to what extent they should do so, and this exercise of the spiritual law is called self-control. — Gregory Palamas

Natural play strengthens children's self-confidence and arouses their senses-their awareness of the world and all that moves in it, seen and unseen. — Richard Louv

Despite your delusions to the contrary, swingers, by and large, are a civilized lot. We come in all ages, shapes, sizes, nationalities, and ethnicities. We have differing beliefs, varying opinions, IQs, and senses of humor. We have families, friends, careers, hobbies, mortgages, and retirement plans. In short, we're just like everyone else. We don't strap on leather chaps and nipple clamps to go about our day. Wearing kinks on our sleeves like badges of honor isn't our style. Truth be told, we don't talk that much about our dalliances - -at least not to Vanilla folk. We're not ashamed. We simply assume most of the world doesn't get our way of life. And more times than not, we're right. — Daniel Stern

He wants to run, but where? However far he goes, he will not escape, cannot escape his own loathsome self. He will always be trapped within his own body, his own mind. The emotional pain that comes with this realization is so strong, it feels physical. He senses it knotting and twisting inside his body, ready to destroy him from within. He is losing his grip, he is losing his mind. Does anyone else know what it is to be dead yet still alive? This is it. This is it . A half-world of torment, where memories frozen into oblivion slowly begin to thaw. A place where everything hurts, where your conscious mind has neither the strength to let you function in the real world, nor the power to return you to hibernation. — Tabitha Suzuma

The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible ... ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure; it supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves. — Ada Louise Huxtable

If you sit down and just keep quiet ... you are in the state of Self-Awareness..keeping quiet means being without any techniques, effort or intention to meditate ... not following the thought stream ... not pursuing the senses, no imagination ... s uch an intense Self-focusing comes without any effort ... then, by itself ... out of nowhere, wisdom and insights come ... — Mooji

What happens when we begin to praise our own abilities? And this is not focusing on an inflated ego, but on appreciation and praise. What happens when we begin sincerely to give thanks for our wonderful minds and our strong and healthy bodies? It's not at all difficult to believe that our own senses of confidence and self-worth are actually activated and strengthened. — John Templeton

While at home his heart dwelt in the silent forests of spiritual thoughts, beating in tune with eternal Pranava-Nada (mystic sound of the Eternal) of the Jnana Ganga (river of Knowledge) within himself. The seven years at home following his return from Tirupati were marked by seclusion, service, intense study of spiritual literature, self-restraint, control of the senses, simplicity in food and dress, abandonment of all comforts and practice of austerities which augmented his inner spiritual power. — SRI SWAMI CHIDANANDA

Do not lose the treasure of your Self for the pleasure of the senses. — Swami Parthasarathy

If pain sometimes shatters the creature's false self sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice' it teaches him the self-sufficiency which really ought to be his - the 'strength which, if Heaven gave it may be called his own': for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports he acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon him through his subjected will. Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self - through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone, that is, from God in ourselves - we are collaborators in, or live instruments of creation: and that is why such an act undoes with 'backward mutters of deserving power' the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species. — C.S. Lewis

Only when all images of Earth are hushed and the clamor of the senses be stilled, and the soul has passed beyond thought of self, can the eternal wisdom be revealed to the mystic who seeks that highest communion with the unseen. — Margaret Smith

Learn to self-conquest, persevere thus for a time, and you will perceive very clearly the advantage which you gain from it. As soon you apply yourself to orison, you will at once feel your senses gather themselves together: they seem like bees which return to the hive and there shut themselves up to work at the making of honey. At the first call of the will, they come back more and more quickly. At last, after countless exercises, of this kind, God disposes them to a state of utter rest and of perfect contemplation. — Teresa Of Avila

Love is the true state of the human heart. When we love, we unguard our hearts. We open ourselves up to the world with- out any restraint. When passion flows, desires stir, our earthy senses become dull, and our ethereal self becomes illumined. At this stage, we are naked, totally naked, with little or no covering of ego. — Salil Jha

Yoga is about the will, working with intelligence and self-reflexive consciousness, can free us from the inevitability of the wavering mind and outwardly directed senses. — B.K.S. Iyengar

All throughout our lives, we selectively draw on selected shavings of life events and reflect upon them through consciousness, creating an arranged catalogue of senses, faculties, and mental activities that compose our personal life story. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It is immediately apparent, however, that this sense-world, this seemingly real external universe - though it may be useful and valid in other respects - cannot be the external world, but only the Self's projected picture of it ... The evidence of the senses, then, cannot be accepted as evidence of the nature of ultimate reality; useful servants, they are dangerous guides. — Evelyn Underhill

Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one's self, to attune to one's subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience. These woman's core sense of shame and their difficulty tolerating painful emotions had led them to avoid turning their attention inward to their internal sense of things. In recovering, they "came to their senses" and learned to trust their sensed experience, in particular their sense of "enoughness"". — Sheila M. Reindl

Ignorance of ignorance, then, is that self-satisfied state of unawareness in which man, knowing nothing outside the limited area of his physical senses, bumptiously declares there is nothing more to know! — Manly Hall

She was a fever from which I will never recover. All heat and hunger. She inflamed my senses. And when she devoured my very soul, when I had nothing left to surrender, she abandoned me to the wreckage of my self, and smiled. In the kingdom of passion the ruler is obsession. — Calvin Klein

Six senses keeping
Five around a sense of self — Dave Matthews

Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that. — Naomi Wolf

it's natural that we associate language with such verbal intercourse. Unfortunately, this association has led many to assume that language is an exclusive attribute of our species - we, after all, are the only creatures that use words - and to conclude that all other organisms are entirely bereft of meaningful speech. It is an exceedingly self-serving assumption. Other animals, commonly possessed of senses far more acute than ours, may have much less need for a purely conventional set of signs to communicate with others of their species, or even to glean precise information from members of other species. — David Abram

Operate within a new form of science that asks not just what is possible, but what is appropriate - appropriate to the well-being of self and Earth. Such a question does not originate in the mental realm but the spiritual, and is felt bodily, once our senses and heart are attuned. So the central part of our being that simply must be allowed to function and be attended is the heart. — Joseph Chilton Pearce

The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth ... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us. — Susan Sontag

This solidity is not true. The apparent solidity is the delusion of the senses and of the self. Everything is made up of infinite, intelligent light. — Frederick Lenz

A great night, with room enough for Heaven to be hidden there from our not too perspicacious eyes. ... It was said that an earthquake shock imperceptible to our senses set those cattle and sheep and horses and pigs crashing through all the hedges of the county. And it was queer: before they had so started lowing and moving Mark was now ready to swear that he had heard a rushing sound. He probably had not! One could so easily self-deceive oneself! The cattle had been panicked because they had been sensible of the presence of the Almighty walking upon the firmament. ... — Ford Madox Ford

There are many paths through the Ring of Life. They are a constant movement toward self-fulfillment through growth of your mind, expansion of your experiences, widening of your senses and growing your spirit. It's ceaseless and constant throughout one's life. — Frosty Wooldridge

The observer self, a part of who we really are, is that part of us that is watching both our false self and our True Self. We might say that it even watches us when we watch. It is our Consciousness, it is the core experience of our Child Within. It thus cannot be watched - at least by anything or any being that we know of on this earth. It transcends our five senses, our co-dependent self and all other lower, though necessary parts, of us.
Adult children may confuse their observer self with a kind of defense they may have used to avoid their Real Self and all of its feelings. One might call this defense "false observer self" since its awareness is clouded. It is unfocused as it "spaces" or "numbs out." It denies and distorts our Child Within, and is often judgmental. — Charles L. Whitfield

The Tempter masters the lazy and irresolute man who dwells on the attractive side of things, ungoverned in his senses, and unrestrained in his food, like the wind overcomes a rotten tree. But the Tempter cannot master a man who dwells on the distasteful side of things, self-controlled in his senses, moderate in eating, resolute and full of faith, like the wind cannot move a mountain crag. — Gautama Buddha

All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is - marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity. — Joseph Conrad

Yoga is an interior penetration leading to integration of being, senses, breath, mind, intelligence, consciousness, and Self. It is definitely an inward journey, evolution through involution, toward the Soul, which in turn desires to emerge and embrace you in its glory. — B.K.S. Iyengar

The old world was destroyed because of its own greed and secretiveness. Those least evolved rose to the top, as happens here. Your leaders, as you call them, are all people with damaged senses of self-worth. The damaged goods run the civilization. That's why it cannot last."
"Abraham Lincoln was damaged goods?"
"The need to lead is a symptom. — Whitley Strieber

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs. — Richard Powers

The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What is meditation? ... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk. — Hermann Hesse

Seek to know thyself by means of thyself, keeping thy mind, intellect and senses, under control; for self is thy friend as it is also thy foe. — Anonymous

When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape. — John O'Donohue

Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for. — Erri De Luca

Isaac is touch, and he is sound. He is smell and he is sight. I tried to make him a single sense like I did with everyone else, but he is all of them. He overpowers my senses and that is exactly why I ran from him. I was afraid of feeling brightly - afraid I would become used to the color and sounds and smells, and they would be taken from me. I was a self-fulfilling prophecy; destroying before I could be destroyed. I wrote about women like that, I didn't realize I was one. — Tarryn Fisher

Never underestimate the power of temptation to disarm your better senses. Throughout the ages good people surrendered their honor for the empty promise that wealth or power would bring fulfillment and their dignity, good name and self-esteem for the passing pleasures of sex and drugs. — Michael Josephson

Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing. — Steve Grand

Life is called Samsara - it is the result of the conflicting forces acting upon us. Materialism says, "The voice of freedom is a delusion." Idealism says, "The voice that tells of bondage is but a dream." Vedanta says, "We are free and not free at the same time." That means that we are never free on the earthly plane, but ever free on the spiritual side. The Self is beyond both freedom and bondage. We are Brahman, we are immortal knowledge beyond the senses, we are Bliss Absolute. — Swami Vivekananda

To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe
to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it
is a wonder beyond words. — Joanna Macy