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Self

individual person as the object of their own reflective consciousness

In philosophy, the self is the idea of a unified being which is the source of an idiosyncratic consciousness.

For in every action what is primarily intended by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or out of free will, it is the disclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every doer, in so far as he does, takes delight in doing; since everything that is desires its own being, and since in action the being of the doer is somehow intensified, delight necessarily follows... Thus, nothing acts unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self. ~ Dante Alighieri
Know thyself. ~ Delphic maxim
Human nature is so constituted that all see and judge better in the affairs of other people than in their own ~ Terence
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
~ William Shakespeare

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

B

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  • There is good evidence for a sensorimotor self, an emotional and motivational self probably represented in the right hemisphere, a social self-system, and perhaps an appetitive self. All these self-systems ordinarily work in reasonable coordination with each other, though they can be in conflict at times.
    • Bernard J. Baars, "Understanding Subjectivity: Global Workspace Theory and the Resurrection of the Observing Self" Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, No. 3, 1996, pp. 211-16
  • One way to think of 'self' is as a framework that remains largely stable across many different life situations. The evidence for 'self as stable context' comes from many sources, but especially from the effects of deep disruptions of life goals. Contextual frameworks are after all largely unconscious intentions and expectations that have been stable so long that they have faded into the background of our lives. We take them for granted, just as we take our health and limbs for granted. It is only when those assumptive entitlements are lost, even for a moment, that the structure of the self seems to come into question. Losing a loved friend may be experienced as a great gap in oneself. ...It helps to take this common tragedy seriously as a basic statement about the self in human psychology.
    • Bernard J. Baars, "Understanding Subjectivity: Global Workspace Theory and the Resurrection of the Observing Self" Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, No. 3, 1996, pp. 211-16
  • Oddly enough, in the sensorimotor area on top of the cortex there are four maps of a little upside-down person, distorted in shape, with every bit of skin and muscle represented in detail. This upside-down map is called the sensorimotor homunculus, the little human. The nervous system abounds in such maps, some of which appear to serve as 'self systems', organizing and integrating vast amounts of local bits of information.
    • Bernard J. Baars, ibid., "Understanding Subjectivity: Global Workspace Theory..."
  • The Arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man’s self.
  • The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one’s own mind.
  • Identities are not tangible anymore. If you look for an identity you find inequality. The self has been refracting.

D

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  • For in every action what is primarily intended by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or out of free will, it is the disclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every doer, in so far as he does, takes delight in doing; since everything that is desires its own being, and since in action the being of the doer is somehow intensified, delight necessarily follows... Thus, nothing acts unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self.
  • Cogito, ergo sum.
  • I think, therefore I am.
    • Descartes Discours de la Méthode, Discourse on the Method (1637)
  • Identity is an illusion, a temporary state. Everyone is searching for it, but it’s only a brief reflection in a very shallow pool of time.
    • Olivia Dresher (b. 1945), American poet and publisher. ‘Aphorisms by Olivia Dresher’ on, Olivia Dresher.com
  • Human beings are so constituted that we take for granted the fact that a direct awareness of our past selves is preserved... We take for granted the durability of the individual self. ...But ...the preservation of memories ...is as great an exercise in magic as the transfer of memories from the dead to the living. ...How the magic works ...is still a dark mystery. ...When once the technology exists to read and write memories from one mind to another, the age of mental exploration will begin in earnest. ...[W]e will look at nature directly through the eyes of the elephant, the eagle and the whale. We will... feel in our own minds the pride of the peacock and the wrath of the lion. That magic is no greater than the magic that enables me to see the rocking horse through the eyes of the child who rode it sixty years ago.

F

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  • Everybody should fear only one person, and that person should be himself.

G

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  • Self-correction begins with self-knowledge.

H

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  • The best mirror is an old friend.
  • It appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer’s voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.
    • Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf, B. Creighton, trans., (New York: 1990), pp. 58-59
  • If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now — when?
    • Hillel, from Leo Rosten's Treasury of Jewish Quotations (1972,) p. 459
  • How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!
    • Eric Hoffer, "Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely'"; in The New York Times Magazine (April 25, 1971), p. 60

J

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  • In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.
  • Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
    • Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

K

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  • “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”
  • Rose: Does something like a "self" exist inside of you?
Colonel: That which you call "self" serves as nothing more than a mask to cover your own being.
Rose: In this era of ready-made 'truths', "self" is just something used to preserve those positive emotions that you occasionally feel...
Colonel: Another possibility is that "self" is a concept you conveniently borrowed under the logic that it would endow you with some sense of strength...

L

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  • Self: that invisible chain that snaps tight whenever we stray.
    • Yahia Lababidi (b. 1973), Egyptian-Lebanese essayist and poet. Signposts to Elsewhere (2008)
  • Knowing others is wisdom.
    Knowing oneself is enlightenment.
    • Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 33, as interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)
  • At the highest level of satori from which people return, the point of consciousness becomes a surface or a solid which extends throughout the whole known universe. This used to be called fusion with the Universal Mind or God. In more modern terms you have done a mathematical transformation in which your centre of consciousness has ceased to be a travelling point and has become a surface or solid of consciousness... It was in this state that I experienced "myself" as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A "membrane".
    • John C. Lilly Tanks for the Memories : Floatation Tank Talks (1995)
  • No Self, No Fear.

M

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  • The self is a simplification of the notion of soul, created to serve the purposes of the modern sciences of psychology and economics, both of which want you to be happy in a simple, straightforward way they can count.
    • Harvey Mansfield, “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science”
  • Self-awareness is a complex, but carefully constructed illusion: we rightly place high value on the work of those mental agencies that appear able to reflect on the behavior of other agencies—especially our linguistic and ego-structure mechanisms.
  • One's present personality cannot share all the thoughts of one's older personalities—and yet it has some sense that they exist. This is one reason why we feel that we possess an inner Self—a sort of ever-present person-friend, inside the mind, whom we can always ask for help.
    • Marvin Minsky, The Society Of Mind (1986)
  • Should one think of a city as having a Self?
  • It strikes me that self, not just my self, but all self, the phenomenon of self, is perhaps one field, one consciousness – perhaps there is only one ‘I’, perhaps our brains, our selves, our entire identity is little more than a label on a waveband. We are only us when we are here. At this particular moment in space and time, this particular locus, the overall awareness of the entire continuum happens to believe it is Alan Moore. Over there – [he points to another table in the pizza restaurant] – it happens to believe it is something else.
    I get the sense that if you can pull back from this particular locus, this web-site if you like, then you could be the whole net. All of us could be. That there is only one awareness here, that is trying out different patterns. We are going to have to come to some resolution about a lot of things in the next twenty years time, our notions of time, space, identity.
    • Alan Moore, in "Alan Moore Interview" by Matthew De Abaitua (1998), later published in Alan Moore: Conversations (2011) edited by Eric L. Berlatsky
  • Self is the medium thro' which Judgment's ray
    Can seldom pass without being turned astray.

N

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  • We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves — so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves? ...We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto, 'everyone is furthest from himself' applies to us for ever, - we are not 'knowers' when it comes to ourselves…

O

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  • Of course, "O'Blivion" was not the name I was born with. That's my television name. Soon, all of us will have special names — names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate.
  • Nosce te ipsum.
    • Know thyself.
    • Delphic maxim originating in Luxor Egypt inscribed in the pronaos (forecourt) of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi as quoted by Pausanias, Description of Greece, 10.24.1.

P

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  • I want to love the self that you say is you.
  • May I not so much be lost as would have
    No time to look at myself
    Ever.
  • I am tipsy after my
    own feelings
    themselves have become wine.
    I forget myself, world and all.

R

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S

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  • This above all: to thine own self be true,
    And it must follow, as the night the day,
    Thou canst not then be false to any man.
  • Whether you become a daughter, sister, lover, partner, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, mother, or anything else with complete honesty, the satisfaction you'll find in becoming yourself cannot be found in becoming any of these relative beings
  • I hope not to encounter such a person again on my path who is interested in everything about me except my true self.
  • People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.
    • Thomas Szasz (b. 1920), Hungarian-American psychiatrist, writer and academic. The Second Sin (1974)

T

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  • You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
    • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010) The Universal and the Particular, p. 54.
  • Human nature is so constituted that all see and judge better in the affairs of other people than in their own.
    • Terence, The Self-Tormentor (163 BC), III. i. 503.

V

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  • What we do belongs to what we are; and what we are is what becomes of us.
  • Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.
    • Henry Van Dyke, The Prison and the Angel

W

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  • To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
    • Oscar Wilde, 'Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young', (1894)
  • Self-image is the beginning and ending of living, I think.
    • Henry Winkler (b.1945), American actor, producer and director. Stated in his appearance on, The One Show, BBC1 (UK) television talk show, 15th May 2009.

See also

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