Mitch: True love is hard to find, sometimes you think you have true love and then you catch the early flight home from San Diego and a couple of nude people jump out of your bathroom blindfolded like a goddamn magic show ready to double team your girlfriend...
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Ron Burgundy: Stay classy, San Diego.
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Ron Burgundy: Ahh, what a beautiful view. Yes, San Diego. You know they've done studies, and it truely is the greatest city in the world. The Germans discovered it in 1904, and they called it "San Diego", which in German means "whale's vagina".
Veronica Corningstone: No, I don't think that is what it means. No, it doesn't mean that.
Ron Burgundy: I don't know. I was just trying to impress you. I don't think anyone knows what it means anymore. The translation was lost hundreds of years ago.
Veronica Corningstone: Doesn't it mean "Saint Diego"?
Ron Burgundy: ...No. No, that isn't it.
Veronica Corningstone: No, I'm pretty sure that's what it means.
Ron Burgundy: Agree to disagree.
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An actor is totally vulnerable. His total personality is exposed to critical judgment - his intellect, his bearing, his diction, his whole appearance. In short, his ego.
-Sir Alec Guinness
"The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art. The Nude is a beautifully written work of sophisticated connoisseurship that analyzes art in its own terms rather than imposing strident, politicized categories on it. It outlines the major body types, male and female, in Western art and, via a wealth of illustrations, trains the reader's eye to detect and evaluate proportion. This book reveres art— an attitude all too rare at universities these days. Students who read Clark will be safely inoculated against the worst excesses of feminist theory, with its prattle about "objectification" and "the male gaze" — terms cooked up by ideologues with glaringly little knowledge or feeling for art."
-Camille Anna Paglia, From an article for Women's Quarterly regarding Kenneth Clark's "The Nude" (1956), 2002
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
-Brian W. Aldiss
The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.
-Ayn Rand
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life:
"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather,"Which wolf will win?"
The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."
-American Indian Proverb
When we begin to realize that we are the co-creators of our lives, we begin to understand the incorporation of Spirit. It is here that we understand the meaning of choice. Through choice we have the opportunity to be responsible for how we act, re-act, think, feel and Be. It is within this responsibility that we can release the ego’s need to find self-power through vengefulness, greed, blame and deception. It is here, that we develop spiritual integrity and the knowingness that we are not alone in our endeavor to find harmony within Mind, Body, and Spirit.
-Linda McCord, "The Relationship of Self", February 26, 2005
"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."
-John Lennon
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory…Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.
-Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Don't think you can attain total awareness and whole enlightenment without proper discipline and practice. This is egomania. Appropriate rituals channel your emotions and life energy toward the light. Without the discipline to practice them, you will tumble constantly backward into darkness.
-Lao-Tzu
The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is "Unending." In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically , she is the mind and they are the five senses. They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, and an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A. Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness...
-Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image
The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.
-Carl Gustav Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man
The great corrupter of public man is the ego....Looking at the mirror distracts one's attention from the problem.
-Dean Acheson, [from a speech to the Society of American Historians, as reported in The Wall Street Journal], April 22, 1966
Well, one of the problems about being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, "Be careful lest in casting out your devils that you cast out the best thing that's in you." So many people who are really in deep analysis look as though and act as though they have been filleted. There's no bone there, there's no stuff! How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.
-Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work By Joseph Campbell; Edited and with an introduction by Phil Cousineau; Foreword by Stuart L. Brown
In any influence, will, a self, the ego, the I AM is the greater force to be dealt with, but as numbers do influence, a knowledge of same certainly gives an individual a foresight into relationships.
-Edgar Cayce
The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.
-George Eliot
Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results.
-Thomas Merton, "Love & Living"
Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
-Colin Powell
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
-George Santayana
With the disappearance of God the Ego moves forward to become the sole divinity.
-Dorothee Sölle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance
The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.
-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
"Fashon is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath -- tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute."
-William Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays, 1839
If we want to know what happiness is we must seek it, not as if it were a part of gold at the end of the rainbow, but among human beings who are living richly and fully the good life. If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double Dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar gold button that has rolled under the cupboard in his bed room. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living 24 crowded hours of the day. If you live only for yourself you are always an immediate danger of being bored to death with the repetition of your own views and interests. No one has learned the meaning of living until he has surrendered his ego to the service of his fellowmen. If your ambition has the momentum of an express train at full speed, if you can no longer stop your mad rush for glory, power, or intellectual supremacy, try to divert your energies into socially useful channels before it is too late.
For those who seek the larger happiness and greater effectiveness open to human beings there can be but one philosophy of life, a philosophy of constructive altruism. The truly happy man is always a fighting optimist. Optimism includes not only altruism but also social responsibility, social courage and objectivity. The good life demands a working philosophy as an orientating map of conduct. This is the golden way of life. This is the satisfying life. This is the way to be happy though human.
-W. Beran Wolfe, 'How To Be Happy Though Human, 1932
Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories, they are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of diversion and preference.
-John Dewey, The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy, 1909
But no language is perfect, no vocabulary is adequate to the wealth of the given universe, no pattern of words and sentences, however rich, however subtle, can do justice to the interconnected Gestalts with which experience presents us. Consequently the phenomenal forms of our name-conditioned universe are "by nature delusory and fallacious." Wisdom comes only to those who have learned how to talk and read and write without taking language more seriously than it deserves. As the only begotten of civilization and even of our humanity, language must be taken very seriously. Seriously, too, as an instrument (when used with due caution) for thinking about the relationships between phenomena. But it must never be taken seriously when it is used, as in the old creedal religions and their modern political counterparts, as being in any way the equivalents of immediate experience or as being a source of true knowledge about the nature of things.
-Aldous Huxley
There is a form that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter-loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and is totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the artless heart of child or man, without egoism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life.
-William Osler
The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action, and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader's following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies.
As soon as the vacillating masses find themselves facing an opposition that is made up of different groups of enemies their sense of objectivity will be aroused and they will ask how is it that all the others can be in the wrong and they themselves, and their movement, alone in the right.
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. 3, 1925
"The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category."
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true—they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the superego, what you will. They said, You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love. They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted."
-John Fowles, The Magus
I learnt that men were moved by a savage egoism, that love was only the dirty trick nature played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.
-W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up [1938], Chapter XXI
Love therefore—the most beautiful phenomenon in the soul-filled creation, the omnipotent magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and of the most sublime virtue—Love is only the reflection of this single original power, an attraction of the excellent, grounded upon an instantaneous exchange of the personality, a confusion of the beings.
When I hate, so take I something from myself; when I love, so become I so much the richer, by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of an alienated property - hatred of man a prolonged suicide; egoism the highest poverty of a created being.
-Friedrich von Schiller, Philosophical Letters, Vol. III pp 210-211
All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health.
-Germaine Greer
All inner resistance is experienced as negativity in one form or another. All negativity is resistance. In this context, the two words are almost synonymous.
Negativity ranges from irritation or impatience to fierce anger, from a depressed mood or sullen resentment to suicidal despair. Sometimes the resistance triggers the emotional pain body…The ego believes that through negativity it can manipulate reality and get what it wants.... The fact is, of course, that negativity does not work. Instead of attracting a desirable condition, it stops it from arising. Instead of dissolving an undesirable one, it keeps it in place.
Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let it go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard-done-by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane.
-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.
-Bertrand Russell
The limousine is the ultimate ego trip, the supreme sign of success. It shouts: "Hey, this guy is really and truly Mr Big."
-William Proxmire, Testimony to House Committee on Government Operations; in NY "Times", September 20, 1985
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention -- on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God -- that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.
-W. H. Auden
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own - for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
-Rod Serling, episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" [orig. air date March 4, 1960]
Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact.
In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us. This is the message of old religions and new psychiatries. Unless this message is heard, unless we ... can give up our delicious satisfactions in opportunities for vengeful retaliation on scapegoats, we cannot expect to preserve our peace, our public safety, or our mental health.
[...]
But the punitive attitude persists. And just so long as the spirit of vengeance has the slightest vestige of respectability, so long as it pervades the public mind and infuses its evil upon the statute books of the law, we will make no headway toward the control of crime. We cannot assess the most appropriate and effective penalties so long as we seek to inflict retaliatory pain.
-Karl Menninger, The Crime of Punishment, Viking Press, 1969
I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.
-Frantz Fanon
For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the seasons of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
-Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon
If you live only for yourself you are always an immediate danger of being bored to death with the repetition of your own views and interests. No one has learned the meaning of living until he has surrendered his ego to the service of his fellowmen.
-W. Beran Wolfe
Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulation, nor morality is categorically a "good thing" to have more of, without limits. All are subject to diminishing returns, and ultimately negative returns.
-Thomas Sowell
"Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness."
-Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, 1970
A soul is not something that you have. It is what you are. I usually use the term “entity” in preference to the term “soul,” simply because those particular misconceptions are not so connected with the word “entity,” and its connotations are less religious in an organizational sense.
The trouble is that you frequently consider the soul or entity as a finished, static “thing” that belongs to you but is not you. The soul or entity—in other words, your most intimate powerful inner identity—is and must be forever changing. It is not, therefore, something like a cherished heirloom. It is alive, responsive, curious. It forms the flesh and the world that you know, and it is in a state of becoming.
Now, in the three-dimensional reality in which your ego has its main focus, becoming presupposes arrival, or a destination—an ending to that which has been in a state of becoming. But the soul or entity has its existence basically in other dimensions, and in these, fulfillment is not dependent upon arrivals at any points, spiritual or otherwise.
The soul or entity is always in a state of flux, or learning, and of developments that have to do with subjective experience rather than with time or space. This is not nearly as mysterious as it might sound. Each of my readers plays a game in which the egotistical conscious self pretends not to know what the whole self definitely does know. Since the ego is definitely a part of the whole self, then it must necessarily be basically aware of such knowledge. In its intense focus in physical reality, however, it pretends not to know, until it feels able to utilize the information in physical terms.
You do have access to the inner self, therefore. You are hardly cut off from your own soul or entity. The ego prefers to consider itself the captain at the helm, so to speak, since it is the ego who most directly deals with the sometimes tumultuous seas of physical reality, and it does not want to be distracted from this task.
-Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul
The downside of spiritual education is the buildup of the vanity of 'I know' and the devaluation of people who are 'not spiritual'. Therefore it is important as a foundation to spiritual training and education to learn how consciousness manifests as the ego and its mechanisms.
-David R. Hawkins
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous, on the contrary, it makes them for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.
-W. Somerset Maugham
It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success.
-John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.
-Albert Camus
I got this today," they say; "tomorrow I shall get that. This wealth is mine, and that will be mine too. I have destroyed my enemies. I shall destroy others too! Am I not like God? I enjoy what I want. I am successful. I am powerful. I am happy. I am rich and well-born. Who is equal to me? I will perform sacrifices and give gifts, and rejoice in my own generosity." This is how they go on, deluded by ignorance. Bound by their greed and entangled in a web of delusion, whirled about by a fragmented mind, they fall into a dark hell. Self-important, obstinate, swept away by the pride of wealth, they ostentatiously perform sacrifices without any regard for their purpose. Egotistical, violent, arrogant, lustful, angry, envious of everyone, they abuse my presence within their own bodies and in the bodies of others.
-Bhagavad Gita
As armed conflict is highly gendered and women’s experiences during war differ from those of men, any conflict mapping and tracking exercise undertaken for use in negotiation must also take account of shifting gender relations and women’s activities throughout all phases of conflict and its aftermath.
Effectiveness of peace processes requires that they are built on the widest base of experience. Thus they need to take into account women’s lived experiences before, during and post-conflict. Failure to do so can lead to an impoverished understanding of peace and security that focuses on militarism and power supported by force. Attention also needs to be focused on women’s experiences post-conflict. Collapsed civilian structures may mean continuing and pervasive lawlessness and women’s experiences of violence do not stop with the cessation of hostilities. There must also be studies on the militarization of humanitarian aid and its impact upon women.
-Anon., Peace agreements as a means for promoting gender equality and ensuring participation of women - A framework of model provisions", Report of the Expert Group Meeting, November, 2003
