Self Construct Quotes

This dual position suggests a basic tension or 'existential dilemma' in human living that each of us seeks to resolve: the search for, and attempt to construct, a way of being that somehow will balance our unique reflections upon our lived experience with the perceived demands and desires of being-with-others. In this sense, the fundamental project of living, for all of us, becomes the struggle to achieve relational balance between or experience of our own self-construct, our experience of others as we have construed them to be, and our experience of that 'between-ness' that emerges through our every encounter with the world. ~ Ernesto Spinelli

I'm more interested in the psychic intricacies that they build up and try to run away from, and how they self-construct. A lot of my work is about self-construction. Here, it's those folks who are deeply wounded and bewildered. They're not just victims of trauma; they've been shaken so forcefully that they don't quite know how or where to stand. ~ Chang-rae Lee

Choosing any particular lifestyle is disquieting. Decision-making requires giving up something and believing in something. I abhor making choices because I am greedy and insincere. I might create a stronger sense of self if I made conscious choices, by selecting what truly matters in my life, by dedicating my very being to a central precept. I remain unengaged with any stabilizing concepts and my self is in a constant state of changing. I spend time composing a self, only to turn about and destroy my unsatisfactory self, resulting in a continual state of making and revamping my sense of self. Just when family members and friends think they know who I am, I drastically change. People cannot love or even profess affection for a flaky person such as me, a Proteus-like elusive sea creature that is in a constant state of metamorphosis, a person they cannot pin down or pigeonhole as a specific type of person. My staunch refusal to commit to any permanent membrane ensures that I will always remain unknown and therefore unloved and unlovable. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Equitable and righteous thoughts are essential. A humble person who seeks an authentic life overlooks errors of other people, accepts criticism, and assumes exclusive responsibility for performing the necessary task in his or her own life. A person with integrity throws off darkness and feeds his or her soul. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say - Yes; and act like other people. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan's request? Couldn't Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.
Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term "fire" exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of "seditious roots" that could "dynamite the world" the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling - out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies. ~ L.L. Barkat

You must stop editing
or you'll never finish anything. Begin with a time-management decision that indicates when the editing is to be finished: the deadline from which you construct your revisionary agenda. Ask yourself, 'How much editing time is this project worth?' Then allow yourself that time. If it's a 1,000-word newspaper article, it's worth editing for an hour or two. Allow yourself no more. Do all the editing you want, but decide that the article will go out at the end of the allotted time, in the form it then possesses. ~ Kenneth Atchity

What I want to express is a feeling-various emotions that I am experiencing at the time-whether it is anger or hope or anything else, and from different angles. I construct a collection and it takes concrete form. That's probably what appears conceptual to people because it never starts out with any specific historical or geographical reference. My point of departure is always abstract and multileveled. ~ Rei Kawakubo

Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it's only the other fellow who's greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system. ~ Milton Friedman

It makes you a different person, to not have a past. It eats away at who you are, until what's left is all construct, all artifice. ~ Holly Black

Whether or not science can be applied to that mental construct [i.e. the designed entity] is a matter of availability. If there is body of scientific knowledge that can be applied, then it would be foolish not to exploit it. However, if there is none, it does not mean that the thing cannot be designed, made, and used safely. ~ Henry Petroski

THE BARROW

In this high field strewn with stones
I walk by a green mound,
Its edges sheared by the plough.
Crumbs of animal bone
Lie smashed and scattered round
Under the clover leaves
And slivers of flint seem to grow
Like white leaves among green.
In the wind, the chestnut heaves
Where a man's grave has been.

Whatever the barrow held
Once, has been taken away:
A hollow of nettles and dock
Lies at the centre, filled
With rain from a sky so grey
It reflects nothing at all.
I poke in the crumbled rock
For something they left behind
But after that funeral
There is nothing at all to find.

On the map in front of me
The gothic letters pick out
Dozens of tombs like this,
Breached, plundered, left empty,
No fragments littered about
Of a dead and buried race
In the margins of histories.
No fragments: these splintered bones
Construct no human face,
These stones are simply stones.

In museums their urns lie
Behind glass, and their shaped flints
Are labelled like butterflies.
All that they did was die,
And all that has happened since
Means nothing to this place.
Above long clouds, the skies
Turn to a brilliant red
And show in the water's face
One living, and not these dead."

- Anthony Thwaite, from The Owl In The Tree ~ Anthony Thwaite

Our bond was Palestine. It was
a language we dismantled to construct a home. ~ Susan Abulhawa

We take a word, such as freedom, and dress it up to mean the ability to bear firearms, display flags, collect rainwater or grow clean food, but absolute freedom is not a relative construct. It is not there one minute or outlawed the next. It can never be seized or given. It is ever-lasting and omnipresent. ~ Anita B. Sulser PhD

Do I make up some 'god' in my mind, or do I make up my mind to know God? ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The philosopher's hesitation about language is a chastening reminder that we ought not place too much faith in whatever our religious construct is. When the construct fails us, as it surely will, we will remember that there was presumption in giving our heart so wholly to whatever it was we had said about God anyway. And when the construct fails us, maybe we will glimpse the God beneath the picture we had faithfully, longingly, lovingly made. Hush. In this poverty of expression, thou findest that He is all. ~ Lauren F. Winner

All theatre, by virtue of its being a cultural construct and therefore ideologically inscribed, is political. ~ Mark S. Weinberg

Effort and hard work construct the bridge that connects your dreams to reality. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

If we are to talk in the language of social constructions, then the construction of the very concepts of the social and the biological must also be elucidated. ~ Denise Riley

Just as we are not all equally able to carry a tune or draw a straight line, many people simply cannot recognize the gaps in their own knowledge or understand their own inability to construct a logical argument. Education ~ Thomas M. Nichols

One could construct a hundred different narratives, it didn't make them true. ~ Silvia Moreno-Garcia

My wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry. ~ Vilfredo Pareto

As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don't know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written). ~ Fernando Pessoa

A person shouldn't talk too much, Ella realised. With writing, you could construct a whole world, but talking too much could demolish it. ~ Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

Other people think destiny is a time in one's life, such as the moment one becomes an adult, or the instant it becomes necessary to construct a hiding place out of sofa cushions. And still other people think that destiny is an invisible force, like gravity, or a fear of paper cuts, that guide everyone throughout their lives, whether they are embarking on a mysterious errand, doing a treacherous deed, or deciding that a book they have begun reading is too dreadful to finish, ~ Lemony Snicket

When I first concluded to print the book, I made an honest effort to construct it in the third person. ~ John Sergeant Wise

On one hand, the RGI [Race Grievance Industry] will declare that race is a social construct, but then use race to socially construct a paycheck. ~ Taleeb Starkes

The Hell of Regret He who wins the race cannot run with the pack. And once you get out you can't come back, because caged lions don't mate with free ones! If ever you are going to win, you
must forsake the social construct of the cage and all the cage dwellers. ~ T.D. Jakes

The progress of a struggling teen has less to do with the application of specific parenting techniques than with the parents' own patient, persistent efforts to construct relationships with their son or daughter. ~ Marian Sandmaier, “More Than Love,” The Family Therapy Networker, May/June 1996

How can you construct a morality if there's no morality inherent in the way things are? You might be able to delude yourself into thinking you had 'created' a morality, but that's all it would be, an illusion. ~ John Lennox

I want to see something that I've never seen before, so how can I tell that actor what that is? I'm not trying to construct a document or situation that is what I want, because what I want is something new to me. ~ Robert Altman

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result. ~ Leonard Sax

Plastics, as a material, are very nasty, but as an alternative to, let's say, a brick, which seems really natural, they start to look pretty good. They're very low energy to produce, very lightweight to transport and construct. That's why they're so popular. ~ Greg Lynn

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read. ~ Darin Strauss

I had to go back and reread the page a few times. As I read it, I kept drifting out of the book, out of the booth, and coasting on the green crest of the song, to the momentary idea that any point on Earth was mine for the visiting, that I'd lucked out living in the reality I was in. And I also got the feeling I was souring and damaging that luck by enjoying the contentment of pulling the shades on the sun, and shutting out my fellow employees and the world, and folding myself up in the construct of a brilliant novel like The Man in the High Castle, that all the reading I'd been doing up to this point hadn't enhanced my life, but rather had replaced and delayed it. ~ Patton Oswalt

It seems a little paradoxical to construct a configuration space with the coordinates of points which do not exist. ~ Louis De Broglie

I would construct and work along various lines until I found them untenable. When one theory was discarded, I developed another at once. I realized very early that this was the only possible way for me to work out all the problems. ~ Thomas A. Edison

Remember not to complain about the matter but construct, compose, compass and conquer the matter ~ Ikechukwu Joseph

Anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up. You are a pedant, my dear fellow. The important thing is to construct. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Our faith in democracy, personal freedoms and human 'rights', and the other comforting prescriptions of the humanist liberal credo stem from the supremacy of maritime over territorial power. Pragmatists may deplore this as crude determinism, as another vain attempt to construct a general theory of history. They should reflect on the sort of political philosophy and structures we might now adhere to had the Habsburgs, Bourbons, Bonaparte, Hitler, Stalin or his heirs prevailed in the titanic world struggles of the past four centuries. ~ Peter Padfield

The Americans make associations to give entertainment, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner, they found hospitals, prisons and schools. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket. ~ Stacy Schiff

The show definitely has a romantic construct, and that's a genre that I've never had access to, in a significant way. This interesting for me to see, as an Asian guy, just standing back. I just wanted to break my way into a different genre. I was tickled that it was offered to me. ~ John Cho

There is no such things as race," said Morrison. "Racism is a construct; a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it. People who don't like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So [racism] has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being ~ Toni Morrison

Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation. ~ Saint Augustine

Luck is simply a construct to make people believe they are in control of some aspect of their destinies. ~ Veronica Roth