No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors… This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it...

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.

The self is not so much linked to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the same thing as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the self aged fifty is the continuation of the self aged forty.