Self Concept Clarity Quotes

Where you live shapes how you see the whole world, but when you see the world it shapes how you see yourself. ~ Richie Norton

Self-forgiveness is a daily practice of the humble, strong and mentally sane. It is an intentional preservation of inner-peace and a reflection of a healthy self-concept. ~ Shannon Tanner

The emerging church, reformed according to the needs of self-esteem-starved-souls under the Lordship of Christ ... will help us to affirm the concept that 'While god's ideas may seem humanly impossible, he will give us these ideas which will lead to glorious, self-esteem-generating success. ~ Robert H. Schuller

One of the greatest lies is to believe that we don't have value. One of the greatest mistakes is to act on that belief. And the greatest liberation is found in looking at the cross of Christ and realizing the enormity of the lie. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

All these self-serving efforts by powerful factions to define their racist rhetoric as nonracist has left Americans thoroughly divided over, and ignorant of, what racist ideas truly are. It has all allowed Americans who think something is wrong with Black people to believe, somehow, that they are not racists. But to say something is wrong with a group is to say something is inferior about that group. These sayings are interlocked logically whether Americans realize it or not, whether Americans are willing to admit it or not. Any comprehensive history of racist ideas must grapple with the ongoing manipulation and confusion, must set the record straight on those who are espousing racist ideas and those who are not. My definition of a racist idea is a simple one: it is any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way. I define anti-Black racist ideas - the subject of this book - as any idea suggesting that Black people, or any group of Black people, are inferior in any way to another racial group. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

The self of which you speak, whether it is the great self or the small self, is only a concept that does not correspond to any reality. ~ Gautama Buddha

Self-image, the concept we have of ourselves, must begin not by looking in the mirror but by looking into the face of God. ~ Sam Storms

Who I've determined I am is limited by the fact that I'm the one who's done the determining. With that being the case, I'd be wiser to consider who God says I am. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Anarchism recognizes only the relative significance of ideas, institutions, and social forms. It is, therefore, not a fixed, self-enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and tum them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown. ~ Rudolf Rocker

All moral relationships are indissoluble according to their concept, as one can easily convince one's self by postulating their truth. A true state, a true marriage, a true friendship, and indissoluble. But no state, no marriage, no friendship corresponds completely to its concept... (Karl Marx) ~ Eugene Kamenka

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition. ~ Tana French

The basic recurring theme in Hindu mythology is the creation of the world by the self-sacrifice of God - "sacrifice" in the original sense of "making sacred" - whereby God becomes the world which, in the end, becomes again God. This creative activity of the Divine is called lila, the play of God, and the world is seen as the stage of the divine play. Like most of Hindu mythology, the myth of lila has a strong magical flavour. Brahman is the great magician who transforms himself into the world and then performs this feat with his "magic creative power", which is the original meaning of maya in the Rig Veda. The word maya - one of the most important terms in Indian philosophy - has changed its meaning over the centuries. From the might, or power, of the divine actor and magician, it came to signify the psychological state of anybody under the spell of the magic play. As long as we confuse the myriad forms of the divine lila with reality, without perceiving the unity of Brahman underlying all these forms, we are under the spell of maya. (...) In the Hindu view of nature, then, all forms are relative, fluid and ever-changing maya, conjured up by the great magician of the divine play. The world of maya changes continuously, because the divine lila is a rhythmic, dynamic play. The dynamic force of the play is karma, important concept of Indian thought. Karma means "action". It is the active principle of the play, the total universe in action, where everything is dynamically connect ~ Fritjof Capra

If you can forget the stultifying concept that there are appropriate years for certain endeavors (like getting married) and appropriate days for being gay and merry (like Saturday nights) and use these times without embarrassment or self-pity to do something creative and constructive, I believe half your single girl battle is over. ~ Helen Gurley Brown

Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought. ~ Annie Besant

To embrace all things means also that one rids oneself of any concept of separation; male and female, self and other, life and death. ~ Brian Browne Walker

I am sometimes asked about the concept or definition of a 'public intellectual,' and though I find the whole idea faintly silly, I believe it should ideally mean that the person so identified is self-sustaining and autonomously financed. Susan was pre-eminently one such. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Rogers believed that we have within ourselves enormous potential for self-understanding and for altering our self-concept and for our behaviour. He believed that this potential can be tapped if a climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided, which person-centred therapy aims to do ~ Jacqui Stedmon

Don't allow the opinions of other people to shape your concept of him. Get to know him yourself, and let the goodness of God change you from the inside out. ~ Judah Smith

So, what is my concept of a perfect life?

Doing something you love, being in the company of someone you love, while all material needs are satisfied. (Hmmm…sounds almost too simple, yet it does sound like the correct formula for me.)

Let's try to simplify: Enjoyment, Love, Satisfaction.

I truly believe that each of these core elements not only apply to our relationship with others and the world around us, but more importantly to our relationship with our self. That is likely one of the keys to personal fulfillment: enjoying the person you are, loving the person you are and being satisfied with the person you are.

If you are not, something must change before you start worrying about gaps or missing elements regarding your relationship to the world around you. Too often, people go chasing elusive relationships and opportunities, seeking enjoyment, love and satisfaction without first attending to their relationship with their self.

Start with the core, before searching for more. ~ Rob Kozak

It is quite natural to think of the self as something concrete, but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an abstract product of our minds, a convenient concept or schema that enables us to relate our present self with our past, future, and conditional selves, and thereby to create an illusion of coherence and continuity from a big jumble of disparate experiences. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum total of our ego defences, and that it is therefore tantamount to one gigantic ego defence, namely, the ego itself. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home. ~ Neel Burton

Here's a memonic device that I feel teaches how we can properly cope with failure. Forget about your failures; don't dwell on past mistakes Anticipate failure; realize that we all make mistakes. Intensity in everything you do; never be a failure for lack of effort. Learn from your mistakes; don't repeat previous errors. Understand why you failed; diagnose your mistakes so as to not repeat them. Respond, don't react to errors; responding corrects mistakes while reacting magnifies them. Elevate your self-concept. It's OK to fail, everyone does; now how are you going to deal with the failure ~ Steve Largent

When you're very young and you're different, you begin to believe that no one has ever been as different as you and that no one has ever felt that difference as keenly as you. ~ B.R. Sanders

Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction - a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under or over-protectiveness, in a distrust in parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity - a flexible concept - be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking; that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first. ~ Jim Thompson

[What is honor] - I suspect that if, after reading this book, you were to go and ask the question of your friends and acquaintances, you might experience some difficultly finding someone who could give you, off the cuff, an accurate and adequate definition of honor. Those who do respond will probably offer synonyms, digging into their memories for other words that are seldom used in today's world, like integrity, probity, morality, and self-sufficiency based upon an ethical and moral code. Some might even refine that further to include a conscience, but no one has ever really succeeded in defining honor absolutely, because it is a very personal phenomenon, resonating differently in everyone who is aware of it. We seldom speak of it today, in our post-modern, post-everything society. It is an anachronism, a quaint, mildly amusing concept from a bygone time, and those of us who do speak of it and think of it are regarded benevolently, and condescendingly, as eccentrics. But honor, in every age except, perhaps, our own, has been highly regarded and greatly respected, and it has always been one of those intangible attributes that everyone assumes they possess naturally and in abundance. The standards established for it have always been high, and often artificially so, and throughout history battle standards have been waved as symbols of the honor and prowess of their owners. But for men and women of goodwill, the standard of honor has always been individual, jealously guarded, in ~ Jack Whyte

So, what...in the meantime, you just..." He glanced at her then back at the road. "Deny yourself?"

Em gave a half smile at the incredulity in his voice. Clearly it was a foreign concept to him. "It's okay. I have a battery operated boyfriend awaiting my attention when I get home."

He shot her a quick, open-mouthed stare, his lips parted enticingly. He looked so stunned at her admission she couldn't help but laugh.
"Sorry, didn't you know that women did that, too? Did I shock you?"

"Not at all." He recovered quickly, a big smile splitting his profile. "I'm just trying to decide which is sexier. Self-denial or self-abuse. ~ Amy Andrews

The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations ... A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive
and nowhere else!
and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race ...
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Putin likes to quote a sentence from Czar Alexander III, who said that Russian has only two allies - the army and the navy. As a citizen, this makes me sit up and take notice. This is a concept of self-imposed isolation, a defense strategy that sees Russia surrounded by enemies. ~ Vladimir Sorokin

I'm a self-confessed geek, and my whole concept of music at first was entirely electronic. In many ways, it turned out to be an advantage. I was so green, so utterly naive about the nature of classical music, that I did things that made me look totally, deliberately unorthodox. ~ Eric Whitacre

Legislation that would withhold funding for the United Nations is fundamentally flawed in concept and practice, sets us back, is self-defeating, and doesn't work. ~ Susan Rice

The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of the radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world - the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history, has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them. ~ Hannah Arendt

Interdependence is a far more mature, more advanced concept. If I am physically interdependent, I am self-reliant and capable, but I also realize that you and I working together can accomplish far more than, even at my best, I could accomplish alone. ~ Stephen R. Covey

Some psychologists and philosophers are distrustful of the concept of self. They argue against it because they do not like separating man from the continuum with animals, and they believe the concept of the self gets in the way of scientific experimentation. But rejecting the concept of "self" as "unscientific" because it cannot be reduced to mathematical equations is roughly the same as the argument two and three decades ago that Freud's theories and the concept of "unconscious" motivation were "unscientific." It is a defensive and dogmatic science - and therefore not true science - which uses a particular scientific method as a Procrustean bed and rejects all forms of human experience which don't fit. ~ Rollo May

Wild eyes were another sign. It is something I have seldom seen - the expression of an ecstatic state - though much is foolishly written of them, as if they grew like Jerusalem artichokes along the road. The eyes are black, right enough, whatever their normal color is; they are black because their perception is condensed to a coal, because the touch and taste and perfume of the lover, the outcry of a dirty word, a welcome river, have been reduced in the heat of passion to a black ash, and this unburnt residue of oxidation, this calyx, replaces the pupil so it no longer receives but sends, and every hair is on end, though perhaps only outspread on a pillow, and the nostrils are flared, mouth agape, cheeks sucked so the whole face seems as squeezed as a juiced fruit; I know, for once Lou went into that wildness while we were absorbing one another, trying to kiss, not merely forcefully, not the skull of our skeleton, but the skull and all the bones on which the essential self is hung, kiss so the shape of the soul is stirred too, that's what is called the ultimate French, the furtherest fuck, when a cock makes a concept cry out and climax; I know, for more than once, though not often, I shuddered into that other region, when a mouth drew me through its generosity into the realm of unravel, and every sensation lay extended as a lake, every tie was loosed, and the glue of things dissolved. I knew I wore the wild look then. The greatest gift you can give another human being is ~ William H. Gass

As psychologist Bruce Hood writes in his book The Self Illusion, you have an origin story and a sense that you've traveled from youth to now along a linear path, with ups and downs that ultimately made you who you are today. Babies don't have that. That sense is built around events that you can recall and place in time. Babies and small children have what Hood calls "unconscious knowledge," which is to say they simply recognize patterns and make associations with stimuli. Without episodic memories, there is no narrative; and without any narrative, there is no self. Somewhere between ages two and three, according to Hood, that sense of self begins to come online, and that awakening corresponds with the ability to tell a story about yourself based on memories. He points to a study by Alison Gopnik and Janet Astington in 1988 in which researchers presented to three-year-olds a box of candy, but the children were then surprised to find pencils inside instead of sweets. When they asked each child what the next kid would think was in the box when he or she went through the same experiment, the answer was usually pencils. The children didn't yet know that other people have minds, so they assumed everyone knew what they knew. Once you gain the ability to assume others have their own thoughts, the concept of other minds is so powerful that you project it into everything: plants, glitchy computers, boats with names, anything that makes more sense to you when you can assume, even joking ~ David McRaney

Many people dedicate their lives to actualizing a concept of what they should be like, rather than actualizing themselves.
This difference between self-actualization and self-image actualization is very important. Most people live only for their image ~ Bruce Lee

Liberalism is, in fact, the ideology of the capitalist revolution that prodigiously raised the living standards of the mass of people; a doctrine gradually elaborated over several centuries, which offered a new concept of social order, encompassing freedom in the only form suited to the modern world. Step by step, in practice and theory, the various sectors of human activity were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of coercive authority and given over to the voluntary action of self-regulating society. ~ Ralph Raico

The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life. ~ Leon Edel

We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we've too often doomed ourselves to be. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Without ending sorrow there is no love. Sorrow is part of your self-interest, part of your egotistic, self-centred activity. You cry for another, for your son, for your brother, for your mother. Why? Because you have lost something that you are attached to, something which gave you companionship, comfort, and all the rest of it. With the ending of that person, you realize how utterly empty, how lonely your life is. Then you cry. And there are many, many people ready to comfort you, and you slip very easily into that network, that trap, of comfort.

There is the comfort in God, which is an image put together by thought, or comfort in some illusory concept or idea. And that's all you want. But you never question the very urge, the desire for comfort, never ask whether there is any comfort at all. One needs to have a comfortable bed or chair - that's all right. But you never ask whether there is any comfort at all psychologically, inwardly. Is it an illusion which has become your truth? You understand? An illusion can become your truth - the illusion that you are God, that there is God. That God has been created by thought, by fear. If you had no fear, there would be no God.

So this is a very complex problem of our life - why we are so shallow, empty, filled with other people's knowledge and with books; why we are not independent, free human beings to find out; why we are slaves. This is not a rhetorical question; it is a question each one of us must as ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is imperative that we move away from the concept of a self as an indivisible, rigid and limited reality. ~ Jane Roberts

…I have never understood the concept of infatuation. It has always been my understanding that being 'infatuated' with someone means you think you are in love, but you're actually not; infatuation is (supposedly) just a foolish, fleeting feeling. But if being 'in love' is an abstract notion, and it's not tangible, and there is no way to physically prove it to anyone else… well, how is being in love any different than having an infatuation? They're both human constructions. If you think you're in love with someone and you feel like you're in love with someone, then you obviously are; thinking and feeling is the sum total of what love is. Why do we feel an obligation to certify emotions with some kind of retrospective, self-imposed authenticity? ~ Chuck Klosterman

We have each had the experience of others reacting to us; often there seems to be no logic to it. But in fact, people do pick up on our subtle energy, and even if they can't see it or put it into words, they feel it and, subliminally, they know. They vote yes, no or maybe according to the qualities and strength of the energy we project. ~ Stuart Wilde

Pantheism is a self-defeating concept, because the concept of a God presupposes a world different from him as an essential correlate. If, on the other hand, the world is supposed to take over his role, then an absolute world without God remains; hence pantheism is only an euphemism for atheism. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer