Tao Te Ching
Dreamstime
True Self
True self is no self but we’re constantly deluded by external praise and blame, internal doubt and delusion. Evolutionary biologists argue that the ability to delude ourselves increases our ability to delude others which makes us more successful in life. This success has produced more offspring which has increased and passed on this particular trait. The “success” of self-deception however has serious down sides and easily becomes a selling of our souls to the devils of materialism. It pads us in a cocoon of illusion that blinds to any kind of authentic, truly meaningful life.
Quotes (94)
“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.”
“That which is the finest essence–this whole world has as its soul. Tat tvam asi — thou art that.”
“All things that appear in this world are transient. If you view all things that appear as never having appeared, then you will realize your true self.”
“Whoever is his true self has an understanding of the universe; whoever has a true understanding of the universe realizes his true self.”
“To find yourself, think for yourself.”
“Why are you running away from yourself and seeking for things outside?... What good is this?”
“Life is such a short journey, why get imprisoned by social convention, peer approval, and useless worries?”
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
“Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it. The original nature of your own mind, it is home, the natural, unmanisfestated state of the universe.”
“The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.”
“Your not having perceived your own nature does not imply that you lack that nature — perception itself IS that nature....”
“Your true nature is something never lost to you even in moments of delusion, nor is it gained at the moment of Enlightenment.”
“things themselves are the true self and the true self itself is things”
“There are many winds full of anger, and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around, but the solid mountain of true nature stays where it's always been”
“Follow your star, for if in all of the sweet life I saw one truth shine clearly, you cannot miss your glorious arrival.”
“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”
“The summit of happiness is reached when a person is ready to be what he is.”
“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.”
“Receive information with more caution from one who praises than from one who blames”
“I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.”
“He who thinks and thinks for himself, will always have a claim to thanks… If it is right, it will serve as a guide to direct; if wrong, as a beacon to warn.”
“The soul is a fire that darts its rays through all the senses; it is in this fire that existence consists; all the observations and all the efforts of philosophers ought to turn towards this Me, the centre and moving power of our sentiments and our ideas.”
“Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.”
“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”
“Only you must not be like everybody else, that’s all. Even if everyone else is one way, you be the only one not like that even if you are the only one.”
“It is possible that our millions of suns make up altogether but a spec in a minute insect in a world vast beyond our ability to imagine which is in some other world no more than a speck of dust.”
“Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning.”
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
“He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.”
“I am life which wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life which wills to live.”
“If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.”
“The self is not only the center but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the center of this totality, just as the ego is the center of consciousness.”
“When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home, that is happiness.”
“My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.”
“A sound man... by never being an end in himself... endlessly becomes himself.”
“You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind.”
“Doubtless like all of us he was many men, turned on one or another of his selves as occasion required, and kept his real self a frightened secret from the world.”
“I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process”
“I mourn when brilliant writers... tell us that we should yield to every impulse and desire, and 'be ourselves'! What jejune nonsense! Civilization... is at almost every moment dependent upon the repression of instincts, and intelligence itself involves discrimination between desire that may be pursued and those that should be subdued.”
“To run true to type is the extinction of a man, his condemnation to death. If he cannot be assigned to a category... half of what is needed is there. He is free from himself, he has acquired an atom of immortality.”
“When you don't follow your nature there is a hole in the universe where you were supposed to be.”
“The white man's symbol is the square. Square is his house, his office buildings with walls that separate people from one another. Square is the door that keeps strangers out... gadgets, boxes—TV sets, washing machines, computers, cars... You become a prisoner inside all these boxes. More and more young white people want to stop being 'straight' and 'square' and try to become round, join our circle. That is good.”
“When you are you, you see things as they are, and you become one with your surroundings. There is your true self.”
“A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities... We are shared, rented, occupied... Our genomes are catalogs of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature... I cannot feel as separate an entity as I did before I was told these things”
“In an age where there is so much talk about ‘being yourself,’ I reserve the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else.”
“Social conditioning depends entirely on persuading people not to accept themselves.”
“the purpose of your life is just to be yourself. That doesn't mean to be yourself in the ordinary sense. It means to be your true self, a self that does good.”
“We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master [when] we become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.”
“Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.”
“True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There's no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected.”
“Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other… and haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self… is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.”
“If you’re always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”
“Forget yourself. Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment.”
“Religious, political, and social labels are like clothing, like a shirt. It’s what people see, but not who we are.”
“One of the most important things in life may be learning to think for ourselves rather than just following a group-mind, status quo belief system. A gauge of how much we truly do this is the extent we share opinions with large groups,”
“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.”
“People pick up some kind of psychic vibrations that you put out, and before you exchange words there is a kind of meeting of the two psyches... If you can afford to be what you are, then that automatically means you could receive others as your guests which makes them feel more comfortable and welcome.”
“Everybody is a caricature of themselves… as well as everything having its own basic fullness. You represent yourself not by name but by being. So there is a sense of completion.”
“You don't have to dress up in fancy costumes, you don't have to have someone—or a whole organization—behind you to prove that what you're doing is right... a tremendous conflict with form goes along with that.”
“You don't need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!”
“But tomorrow I’ll be a different person, never again the person I was. Not that anyone will notice... on the outside nothing will be different.”
“For a brief spell, we share a stage. Others are coming to kick us off. But while you're here, write yourself a good part. Act it well.”
“We are born buddhas, and all dharma practices help us recognize and nurture this truth.”
“In spite of your fears, no matter what happens to your physical body, your true nature is essentially indestructible.”
“the complete integrity of Hesse’s self-absorption is what guarantees the permanence of his work. As long as people struggle with the need to be themselves, and the difficulty of doing so, he will be a living presence—which is even better, perhaps, than being a great writer”
“both the 'self' and freedom are mythological chimeras borrowed from the fairy tales of ancient times... in order to understand ourselves, a crucial step is to acknowledge that the 'self' is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite... Like the government spin doctors... my inner propaganda machine creates a personal myth with prized memories and cherished traumas that often bear little resemblance to the truth.”
“But when you see death, things change. It doesn’t matter if you can’t smile or blink properly”
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