Quotes about Selfhood

As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.

Being general, the categories never address us as individuals. At best our individuality is lost in the generality. At worst, it is contradicted and denied. Such categories force us to lie on their Procrustean bed, and anything about us that doesn't fit they lop off. They trim the picture of our personalities to fit their mass-produced frames.

Be you because everyone else is taken!

We are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness-an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us.

Selfhood is the source of suffering; Truth is the source of bliss.

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

This world is not his world; this life his life.

I have my own identity ... The whole Michael thing does drive me nuts sometimes because people won't leave it alone. He's bald, I have hair. He's almost 40, I'm 22. Seriously though, I wish people would let it be and let me just be Kobe.

It's very hard to find your own words - and you don't actually exist until you have your own words.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

The need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short.

But the need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain.