Ourselves - Quotes
- A question, before you go. What is the truth?
- We place faith in ourselves. We see the world the way it really is and hope that one day all mankind might see the same.
- What is the world, then?
- An illusion. One of which can either submit to - like most do - or transcend.
- What is it to transcend?
- To recognize nothing is true and everything is permitted. That laws arise not from divinity, but reason. I understand now that our creed does not commend us to be free - it commends us to be wise.
What is a man but the sum of his memories? We are the stories we live! The tales we tell ourselves!
There’s no point explaining that all we achieve by exacting revenge is to make ourselves the equals of our enemies, whereas by forgiving we show wisdom and intelligence.
According to Jung, a stranger can see in an instant something in you that you might spend years learning about yourself. [...] How awful we all are when we look at ourselves under a light, finally seeing our reflections. How little we know about ourselves. How much forgiveness it must take to love a person, to choose not to see their flaws, or to see those flaws and love the person anyway. If you never forgive you`ll always be alone.
God doesn`t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves - say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Adversity is like a strong wind. I don`t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
We choose to live (...) rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) "the best part of one`s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it."
The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we`re too poor to buy our freedom.
In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn`t part of ourselves doesn`t disturb us.
God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.