My opinion is that we must lend ourselves to others and give ourselves only to ourselves. If my will happened to be prone to mortgage and attach itself, I would not last: I am too tender, both by nature and by practice.
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
We read because they teach us about people, we can see ourselves in them,in their problems.And by seeing ourselves in them, we clarify ourselves, we explain ourselves to ourselves, so we can live with ourselves.
But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,' I said. On the contrary - we are found!' said Aesop. But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?' Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood.
If we don't get violent with ourselves, castigate ourselves, ostracize ourselves and excommunicate ourselves because we didn't live up to the standards we set down for ourselves, then maybe we don't have to do that with other people.
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.
Concealment is equated, unknowingly to ourselves, with individuality; the more we conceal the more it seems we are asserting our very personality, resisting a somewhat repellent, unwelcome intrusion of other things into ourselves.
We need to remember to teach our children that solitude can be a much-to-be-desired condition. Not only is it acceptable to be alone; at times it is positively to be wished for.....In the silence we listen to ourselves. Then we ask questions of ourselves. We describe ourselves to ourselves, and in the quietude we may even hear the voice of God.
As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves.
The philosophy of fasting calls upon us to know ourselves, to master ourselves, and to discipline ourselves the better to free ourselves. To fast is to identify our dependencies, and free ourselves from them.
We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.
I have always been intrigued by the journals that girls keep. They are like dollhouses. Once you look inside them, the rest of the world seems very far away, even unbelievable. If only we had the power to keep outside ourselves at such moments, we would spare ourselves so much pain and fear. I'm not talking about truth or falsehood but about surviving.
We seek to unify ourselves with the endless light of truth, of God, of nirvana. We recognize the infinite playing through all beings and all forms, but we only have to concern ourselves with ourselves.
Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.
Paradoxically, we fail to disclose ourselves to other people because we want so much to be loved. Because we feel that way, we present ourselves as someone we think can be loved and accepted, and we conceal whatever would mar that image.