4,826 Quotes About Self

I seriously believed I could escape myself–as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself.

If one 'understands' his own Self, he is himself a Parmatma (Absolute Supreme Soul).

I am a star. [...] I am a galaxy.

The self that is self we imagined we were our whole lives. But we were never that self, not really. We were only a series of selves, living one role and then leaving it for another. And all the time convincing ourselves that there was no change. That we were always the same person, living the same life. One arc to a finish, not the stutter-stop improvisation that is our actual lives.

We often try to force the experience we want to have, instead of allowing the experience we were meant to have, and in doing this, we miss out on gaining any new insight or understanding.

Our minds have this strange ability to make associations using ourselves as a reference point. They create our identities based on our relation to people and things. They aim for control because ownership falsely promises us an elevated sense of self. But this is exactly the opposite of love. When we fall in love, we disidentify and get lost for a little while in a song, a beautiful painting, and most of all, we get lost in our lover. And through their love, we find our true infinite selves.

The ‘Self’ (Purush) and ‘Relative-Self’ (Prakruti), are two separate things. Self (Purush) is the Pure Soul (Shuddhatma) and ‘Relative-Self’ (prakruti) is ‘pudgal’ (non-Self complex of matter). Pudgal by nature is a complex of input and output; Self (Purush) by nature is Knowledge.

One is not necessarily made self-centered because he is foolish, but one is very often made foolish because he is self-centered.

Who among us is not the great I AM? Who among us doesn't live in a nightgown or some other bare-ass outfit at the center of his own wide sky--shining, unchanging, without beginning or end, a word in the east and a body in the west?