Self Quotes - page 84
To understand oneself in existence is the Christian principle, except that this self has received much richer and much more profound qualifications that are even more difficult to understand together with existing. The believer is a subjective thinker, and the difference, is only between the simple person and the simple wise person. Here again the oneself is not humanity in general, subjectivity in general, and other such things, whereas everything becomes easy inasmuch as the difficulty is removed and the whole matter is shifted over into the shadow play of abstraction.
Søren Kierkegaard
Nature's process of creation, as it exists in its timelessness, in its oneness and peace, has all the answers to man's needs of growth and progress and development. If the human endeavor first absorbs and then adopts these answers in its developmental process, the growth from cities to mega cities and path to progress would not create silent self digging graves of human extinction.
Manav Gupta
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen.
Francis of Assisi
What's more to do,
Which would be planted newly with the time,
As calling home our exiled friends abroad
That fled the snares of watchful tyranny,
Producing forth the cruel ministers
Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen,
Who, as 'tis thought, by self and violent hands
Took off her life; this, and what needful else
That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace
We will perform in measure, time, and place.
William Shakespeare
Being popular can become narcotic. We can come to crave it and to need the frequent ""fixes"" brought by the world's praise and caresses of recognition. A turned head bows much less easily.
Popularity is dangerous especially because it focuses us on ourselves rather than keeping us attentive to the needs of others. We become preoccupied with self and with being noticed, letting those in real need ""pass by"" us, and we ""notice them not"".
Neal A. Maxwell
Indeed, one of the most cruel games anyone can play with self is the "not yet" game-hoping to sin just a bit more before ceasing; to enjoy the praise of the world a little longer before turning away from the applause; to win just once more in the wearying sweepstakes of materialism; to be chaste, but not yet; to be good neighbors, but not now. One can play upon the harp-strings of hesitations and reservations just so long, and then one faces that special moment-a moment when what has been sensed, mutely, suddenly finds voice and cries out with tears, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."
Neal A. Maxwell
And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.
Julian Jaynes
If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his or her failure will go well beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. "Faking it” in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one's nature, and it will always fail.
Parker Palmer
The idea of vocation I picked up in those circles created distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet-someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.
That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be "selfish” unless corrected by external forces of virtue. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be.
Parker Palmer
Humankind is a lonely creature looking for connections and associations from childhood to the end of his life. This intention to join with the others can also be found in human societies. Stories, legends and most of human efforts tend to a joint and union, the same direction towards which the humankind is heading. The definition of a human being in this theory is not considered to be a good or a devil self. Man is defined as a social creature craving for establishing relationships and connections, without which he will be unable to survive. Linking up with another thing, establishing connections with God, relating to different points of view, associating with dreams and in its most general form sharing life with a spouse are all examples of this instinct in human beings. In a similar pattern, civilizations of the world are following, and will be following, the same path. This is the era of Collaboration of Civilizations, Union of Cultures, and Joining of Religions.
Elia M. Ramollah
