Ego Quotes

One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.

Meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using the ego to observe and tame its own manifestations.

It was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.

When you are in-spirit (inspired) you have no need for the ego.

I don't do anything to try to change people's perceptions of me. I tend to think that's sort of an ego driven thing.

We are shallow because we are mayabang, ego driven, and do not have the humility to understand that we are only human, much too human to mistake knowledge for wisdom.

The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.

When you paint, you forget everything except your object. When you are too much engrossed in it, you are lost in it. And when you are lost in it, your ego diminishes. And when the ego diminishes, love infinite appears.

The ego, as our familiar sense of self, seems predicated on fear. The fear that we might not make it, that we might not get where we want to go. But deep down there is also a grain of fear that we have nothing to give or nothing to offer. I think that's the ego's justifiable anxiety about its substantiality and existence.

I don't have that much of an ego where it's like "How dare you, you can't do something without me."

Forget the dancer, the center of the ego; become the dance. That is meditation.

I am very much aware of my own double self... The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work - he is in touch with the child.

A guy is a lump like a doughnut. So, first you gotta get rid of all the stuff his mom did to him. And then you gotta get rid of all that macho crap that they pick up from beer commercials. And then there's my personal favorite, the male ego.

The whole business is built on ego, vanity, self-satisfaction, and it's total crap to pretend it's not.

I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.

Nobody sets out to make a bad film, but so many of those compromises are made and often they're made because of vanity, pride and ego.

From compassion springs humility. The ego is verily a gateway to hell. The person who is egoistic is far from being religious.

I believe that if one can understand one's false personality or ego, then they can develop self-awareness and the manifesting of that self-awareness is leadership. Such a leader sets up the mechanisms within which creativity can flourish, and managers turn this into innovations in the marketplace and society. But it's never as clear-cut as I'm making it sound. It's much more dynamic, chaotic and fascinating in the way it plays out. That's why people have to operate more from their inner essence; it's the other constant that copes with the legendary constant of change.

Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in right circumstances, and with right treatment, can know that he is a machine, and having fully realized this, he may find the ways to cease to be a machine. First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable “I” or Ego. He is always different. One moment he is one, another moment he is another, the third moment he is a third, and so on, almost without end.

The traits in career politicians the public detests most are produced when ego triumphs over principle.

The point is that you free the ego. The ego is only a pronoun. It's a Greek first person pronoun, ergo. When you're in Greece you say, Ergo wants to take a bus, and you don't mean your ego wants to take a bus, like some big entity, you only mean I want to take a bus.

Buddhism helps us to overcome our endless ego grasping mind to open up to something so much more spacious and genuinely meaningful.

Every single one of the major world faiths, whether we're talking about Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have all come to the conclusion that what holds us back from our better self is ego, selfishness, greed, unkindness, hatred. And it all springs from a sense of thwarted ego.

Why get killed when you can run ... your ego will heal much faster than a broken jaw.

The word begone is a Russian doll. A small, single word, which contains so many others; and when all the smaller words inside line up, they look like a bridge: Be Beg Ego Go On One.

I don't really have an ego. I'm not that bothered.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

If you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego and the internal dialogue.

All I am is what I create. It's my blessing to share with the world.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

In certain cases, a man blind from birth may have an operation performed which gives him his sight. The result: frequently misery, confusion, disorientation. The light that illumines the madman is an unearthly light, but I do not believe it is a projection, an emanation from his mundane ego. He is irradiated by a light that is more than he. It may burn him out.

It's very interesting being an artist and a comedian, (because) you aim for jobs that will feed your ego, but when you get up to the precipice of them, you actually have to deliver. You actually have to understand that you're reaching a new level where there are way more eyes on you, way more expectations and way more pressure.

I definitely have a sexual ego thing. But if I'm suggestive, it's in a nice way. Luckily, no one's ever been hurt...a few girls have passed out, that's all.

There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.

An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.

This may sound arrogant, but I believe that if we'd done teamship better, we'd still be there. Where we fell down was the inability to hold together. We should have learnt from the great football teams. The players may not like each other. They have egos, they have their own ambitions, they have different personalities, but they are still bloody good teams.

Some ego is involved because I guess one wants to be perceived as a good clown and one puts one's name on the art; but it's so hard to do anything in life, trapped as we are in our bodies, that is purely selfless for others... somehow the self is always involved.

Ayn Rand called her novella Anthem a "hymn to man's ego." My approach to Anthem the play was to provide the story a further dimension through music and sound. The work is now larger than a hymn. It's really "spoken opera."

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

It's very clearly stated in the film: You make your own choices, and what you're always fighting is ego.

When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us.

Drugs, alcohol and ego. They are a bad mix.

What is Kanye West's message? Like most rap, "I am the greatest person ever and you're not." I used to call it affirmative action for the ego.

The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

Each Warrior wants to leave the mark of his will, his signature, on important acts he touches. This is not the voice of ego but of the human spirit, rising up and declaring that it has something to contribute to the solution of the hardest problems, no matter how vexing!

There's probably not any kind of music that means more to me than gospel and soul. I heard somebody say that soul music is being proud of where you're from and what you've accomplished, and letting that show. Losing some self-consciousness and ego to join something larger. I like that idea a lot, just letting it all hang out, and on this album we did our best at that.

Ego means self-identification with thinking, to be trapped in thought, which means to have a mental image of "me" based on thought and emotions. So ego is there in the absence of a witnessing presence.

I'm already suspicious of anyone who thinks he or she is smart enough to be president. You'd have to have some ego to believe that about yourself.