Actual Self Quotes

#1. I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one's actual self but for one's ability to arouse desire in the other...Only the thoughts in one's mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently...

Vivian Gornick

#2. You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one's actual self on paper. There's a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.

Kate Millett

#3. Like most of the movies I have participated in before, it's not a far departure from my actual self. TJ is a Special Forces, hand-to-hand combat expert. He's got a big heart. He has a sense of duty that never ends, whether he is active duty or as you find him in Check Point, retired.

Bill Goldberg

#4. Nothing is more harmful to the world than a martial art that is not effective in actual self-defense.

Motobu Choki

#5. She is focused on living her own full life, following her own agenda and cultivating her actual self, rather than reinventing herself or pining away to be someone she's not.

Debra Ollivier

#6. I spin around on the swivel chair and look up at the ceiling; Oliver being Oliver being Oliver being Oliver. I am suddenly aware of the separation between my-actual-self and myself-as-seen-by-others. Who would win in an arm wrestle? Who is better-looking? Who has the higher IQ?

Joe Dunthorne

#7. Take away a man's actual sense of manhood - which is conventionally based on the ability to work, to earn money, to be self-sufficient, to provide for children - and you've got to give them something else. And they did.

Fran Lebowitz

#8. We need to separate the process of evolution - which is, indeed, a self-serving process - and the actual motivations of animals.

Frans De Waal

#9. The actual confident man, the man truly sure of himself, is not he who esteems himself higher than others, but he who is sure enough that he can bear to esteem others higher than himself.

Criss Jami

#10. The decision as to whether to risk one's actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is.

(from The structure of desire and recognition)

Robert B. Brandom

#11. There are no memories which I wanted to blot out of my mind. Always, I have been rather objective in my point of view, able to stand off and observe myself and my surroundings in a rather impersonal fashion. The actual sight of my first casualty was not nearly as bad as I had imagined.

James Carl Nelson

#12. These 'philosophers', etc., seem unaware, to give a specific example, that by teaching and preaching 'identity', which is empirically non-existent in this actual world, they are neurologically training future generations in the pathological identifications found in the 'mentally' ill or maladjusted.

Alfred Korzybski

#13. Mr. Dawkins' assertions are self-refuting- ie. Actual infinity vs. potential infinity easily makes the most reasonable argument for theism and a Deity. Now, the argument for the Creator God of Christianity requires much more time, energy, and logical effort."


~R. Alan Woods [2007]

R. Alan Woods

#14. Honour, in her modern self-confidence, had grown up never having to face actual raw, passionate, drop-down-dead-hostility. She didn't really understand what was going to happen,

Ruth Ahmed

#15. A child with minimal video and TV exposure ... might be more naive about social ills but at the same time more sophisticated in inner direction, self-discipline, and the realities of her actual physical world.

Diane Medved

#16. The gap between our sincere values and our actual behavior is the source of all self-hatred.

Bo Lozoff

#17. Emotionally we have many problems, but these problems are not actual problems; they are something created; they are problems pointed out by our self-centered ideas or views.

Shunryu Suzuki

#18. [We assume] that the self is an actual living thing, but it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death.

Thandie Newton

#19. I have given no definition of love. This is impossible, because there is no higher principle by which it could be defined. It is life itself in its actual unity. The forms and structures in which love embodies itself are the forms and structures in which love overcomes its self-destructive forces.

Paul Tillich

#20. ... in the case where the self is merely represented and ideally presented (vorgestellt), there it is not actual: where it is by proxy, it is not. -Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind

Guy Debord

#21. ...I mistrust folk who are always bringing God or Christ into their conversations. If it is not an actual blasphemy it is at least a presumption. It smacks of self-conceit, doesn't it?

Winston Graham

#22. What passes for education, culture or maturity in most minds is merely how individuals want to think of themselves, a contrived egocentric self-concept, not actual and effective principles and values. This is what is known in the cliche as the "veneer" of civilization.

Kenny Smith

#23. where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom*
*Made it up
and extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.

Terry Pratchett

#24. Your deeper sense isn't a springboard; it's a landing place. If you draw conclusions too quickly or too slowly, you'll establish your self where it doesn't belong. The fine line between the two is in your own deeper sense. It is in your actual knowing within that deeper sense.

John De Ruiter

#25. It is self-evident that any and all paths must be open to a researcher during the actual course of his [or her] investigations.

Karl Weierstrass

#26. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

Anne Carson

#27. Nothing is more helpful to reduce pride than the actual experience of self-knowledge. If we are discouraged by it, we have misunderstood its meaning.

Thomas Keating

#28. I think therapy is a rather misguided notion of capitalist societies whereby the self-indulgent examination of one's life supersedes the actual living of said life.

Peter Cameron

#29. A positive self image and healthy self esteem is based on approval, acceptance and recognition from others; but also upon actual accomplishments, achievements and success upon the realistic self confidence which ensues.

Abraham Maslow

#30. Science can only be comprehended epistemologically , which means as one category of possible knowledge , as long as knowledge is not equated either effusively with the absolute knowledge of a great philosophy or blindly with scientistic self-understanding of the actual business of research.

Jurgen Habermas

#31. Men should do their actual living and working in communities small enough to permit of genuine self-government and the assumption of personal responsibilities, federated into larger units in such a way that the temptation to abuse great power should not arise.

Mahatma Gandhi

#32. A more normal, mature way to think about it [my work] would be, Oh, I work on multiple projects at once and they overlap, but the actual psychology of it is a lot more self-abusing.

Miranda July

#33. A good way to rid one's self of a sense of discomfort is to do something. That uneasy, dissatisfied feeling is actual force vibrating out of order; it may be turned to practical account by giving proper expression to its creative character.

William Morris

#34. Who thinks to interview their own mother? As a self-fixated teen, I never imagined that she had an actual personal history. To my young eyes, she was Source of Cash Obsessed With De-Cluttering

Jancee Dunn

#35. Positive self-direction is the action plan that all winners in life use to turn imagination into reality, fantasy into fact, and dreams into actual goals.

Denis Waitley

#36. Fear echoes your self-defined limitations, not your actual ones. To change your self-image, you must face what scares you.

Vironika Tugaleva

#37. To yield to the threat or actual use of violence is a surrender of one's self respect and religious conviction.

Mahatma Gandhi