论自我

To know and to live in accord with human nature is to yield the force of one's own will to the energy, the being-at-work, within one, to will to become no more and no less than what one is. This is essential Greek wisdom; and its reward is happiness or well-being.

And I'll tel you why, my friend. I can't as yet "know myself" as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. --Socrates

The attainment of self-knowledge of human nature, is all the more urgent and crucial for human beings, because they must choose whether to act in accord with their nature or to act in defiance of it.

All is disgust when one leaves his own nature and does things which misfit it.

If you were a tree, what kind do you think you would be? --A Barbara Walters question for celebrities

This problem of being unwilling to be yourself is as old as history and as universal as human life.

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self. --Cyril Connolly

He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. --Anthony Powell

Nobody wants to be this strenuous thing: an individual; it demands an effort.

If a person does not become what he understands, he does not really understand it.

In life you must die to your false self and be reborn as your true self. This is a fundamental Sufi principle.

I neither estimated myself highly nor lowly: I did not estimate myself at all. --John Stuart Mill

Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist considered the self as something constituted in the "other," that is the conception of the external. In Lacan's view, the self remained in constant internal conflict and that only extensive self-deceit made the situation bearable.

Kierkegaard believes this is the most terrible way to live: to enchant the whole world through one's discoveries and cleverness, to explain all of nature, yet not to understand oneself. --Karl Jaspers

Reflection is primarily self-reflection. To understand oneself is the way to truth.

He mentioned Aldous Huxley---He could look out at the world with wide eyes, with unabashed innocence, awe, and fascination, which is a kind of admission of smallness, a form of humility, and then proceed calmly and unafraid to the great tasks he set for himself.

Our own inner unique self has its own laws, its own inner dynamic, autonomous laws of the psyche rather than of the environment. These laws are different from, separate from, and even opposed to the laws of the external reality.

One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of spirit. Being too busy has this result that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality, who actually has formed his heart will never be popular, not because it is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation. --Kierkegaard

Know that he who is a friend to himself is friend to all men.

不如意事常八九
可与言者无二三