Selfhood Quotes

“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Following all the rules leaves a completed checklist. Following your heart achieves a completed you.”
― Ray A. Davis

“When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.”
― Octavio Paz

“[Grief] is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“Once he said to her: 'You are like me; you are different from other people. You are Kamala and no one else, and within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat any time and be yourself, just as I can. Few people have that capacity and yet everyone could have it.”
― Herman Hesse

“It’s a dangerous thing, to try and give someone everything. One day, you might find you’ve given away things you should’ve kept. Some parts of us must remain inviolate if we are to survive as a person.”
― Johanna van Veen, My Darling Dreadful Thing

“When we find that God's ways always coincide with our own ways, it's time to question who we're really worshipping, God or ourselves. The latter moves the nature of godliness from the King to our servant to a slave, a deduction into the realm of selfhood and then the lower, slavehood. It's a spiritual mathematics in that men who need God in his godhood are humble yet strong and spiritually ambitious while men who need a slave in their selfhood are ultimately paralyzed and will remain paralyzed.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Hold tight to what is most yourself,
Don't squander it, don't let your life
Be governed by what disturbs you.”
― Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri, Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster: Three Abbasid Poets

“She was just one person out of several billion, and most people never become individuals to us. They're just people. We're just strangers passing each other, your anxieties briefly brushing against mine as the fibers of our coats touch momentarily on a crowded sidewalk somewhere. We never really know what we do to each other, with each other, for each other.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“All my life, I've been trying to fill an emptiness inside. But that emptiness...I've built myself around it. Filling it in would be like filling in the empty space within a cathedral.”
― Blake Charlton, Spellbound

“Today I understand vocation quite differently-
not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here" calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God,”
― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

“The king has great power, but he has no power to know me, except through what I say and what I do.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“When I arrive to a new place, it is no longer the place it was before my arrival. And I am not the same person either. I change it and it changes me on the spot. And together we give the world a slightly different face.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“How, then, shall we face the future? When the sailor is out on the ocean, when everything is changing all around him, when the waves are born and die, he does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing. He looks up at the stars. Why? Because they are faithful; they have the same location now that they had for our ancestors and will have for generations to come. By what means does he conquer the changeable? By the eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the ground of the future, and therefore through it the future can be fathomed. What, then, is the eternal power in a human being? It is faith. What is the expectancy of faith? Victory-or, as Scripture so earnestly and so movingly teaches us, that all things must serve for good those who love God.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

“These days, it is perhaps even more psychologically seamless than ever for an ordinary woman to spend her life walking toward the idealized mirage of her own self-image. She can believe – reasonably enough, and with the full encouragement of feminism – that she herself is the architect of the exquisite, constant and often pleasurable type of power that this image holds over her time, her money, her decisions, her selfhood and her soul.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“We say that a human being is a person and a distinctive, fixed self with a name and a life. He has an identity. But what is this self really made of, except from the basic elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus etc. and their subatomic particles? If a person is a specific, static, unchanged entity and existence, then what if an accident or a disease completely alters his body features? What if fear or madness changes his thoughts and perceptions? If dementia takes away his memories, or if drugs alter his emotions? And what if life circumstances, good or bad luck, modify his motives, his plans and his desires? Is it still the person we say he is? Or is selfhood a ghost, a useful fiction of the brain? An ever-shifting kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings and perceptions? Flashes of hopes and desires? A bundle of alternating opinions and ideologies, of conflicting instincts and urges? If we take away all these from him, what would be left behind? If every drop of the ocean evaporates, is not the whole ocean gone? The immutable selfhood is a very old illusion and the last of illusions we ‘re going to abandon; if we ever will…”
― Giannis Delimitsos, A PHILOSOPHICAL KALEIDOSCOPE: Thoughts, Contemplations, Aphorisms

“Love, the phenomenal act of canceling self in favor of the very same self.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Depression demands that we reject simplistic answers, both 'religious' and 'scientific,' and learn to embrace mystery, something our culture resists. . . . Embracing the mystery of depression does not mean passivity or resignation. It means moving into a field of forces that seem alien but is in fact one's deepest self. It means waiting, watching, listening, suffering, and gathering whatever self-knowledge one can—and then making choices based on that knowledge, no matter how difficult. One begins the slow walk back to health by choosing each day things that enliven one's selfhood and resisting things that do not.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

“Many modern gurus encourage us to ‘be ourselves’. Perhaps it has not occurred to them that we can only ever be ourselves – nothing more, nothing less.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“In spite of honest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking me.”
― Jane Welsh Carlyle

“We now live in a world where notions of selfhood have become increasingly malleable,”
― Omar Kholeif, Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age

“I heard she married some hunter, well, they all marry hunters, so did I, ha! You’re just as foolish I expect, young girls are, some lad catches your eye and there’s your whole life gone, snap, a lap full of babies and grandbabies and it’s all over, you’re an old woman knitting at the hearth and that’s it, that’s it!’

I could not wait to get out of there. She shrank my whole life to the size of a poppy seed, and ate it.”
― Betsy James, Listening at the Gate

“She did not care what some pampered citizens thought of her. She knew her worth.”
― Lucy Morris, The Viking She Would Have Married

“To be in favour of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It's not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood. Who are you when you are not a friend, a partner, a lover, a sibling, a parent, a child? When no one is with you, what do you do, and do you do it differently than if someone was there? It's hard to see someone fully when another person is always attached to them. More importantly, it's hard for us to see our own selves if we're not ever alone.”
― Amina Cain

“Fear of the abyss, then, might span the deepest recesses of the psychodrama of selfhood and much more mundane and awkward anxieties about human status. Somewhere between fear and oblivion and fear of what the neighbours might say. Collapsing the distance between the biggest and the smallest questions, as if there were no difference between asking, 'Why am I here?' and asking 'What do they think of me?”
― Gargi Bhattacharyya

“A name... The beginning of an identity, handed down in love.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Four Winds

“What I have studied are the three traditional problems: (1) What are the relations we have to truth through scientific knowledge, to those "truth games" which arc so important in civilization and in which we are both subject and object? (2) What are the relationships we have to others through those strange strategies and power relationships? And (3) what are the relationships between truth, power, and self?”
― Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault

“When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“Humanity is not just about memories. Selfhood is embodied, and a reanimated Hannah Jacques is still Hannah Jacques, just like a Hannah Jacques with dementia is still Hannah Jacques....
"Your husband isn't going to like this."
"Your eyebrows are inexpertly plucked," she says, and walks away.”
― Tade Thompson, The Rosewater Redemption

“What cannot hold you
is meant to carry you forward;
what cannot love you
is meant to free you fiercely.”
― Laura Chouette, The Willow Song