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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
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If egotism means a terrific interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.
-Arnold Bennett
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Egotist. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me.
-Ambrose Bierce
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An egotist is a person interested in himself than in me!
-Ambrose Bierce
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Big egos are big shields for lots of empty space.
-Diana Black
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Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism; and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.
-Christian Nevell Bovee
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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
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Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
-Thomas Carlyle
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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
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Our own self-love draws a thick veil between us and our faults.
-Lord Chesterfield
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The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.
-E. M. Cioran
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All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Enemies of Promise is Connolly's autobiography where he attempted to explain why he failed to produce the literary masterpiece which he and others believed he should have been capable of writing.
-Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938
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I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Thinking is often regarded as an extension of the ego. Clever children in school base their egos on being clever and on being right all the time. They dislike group work because they cannot then show the rest of the class where the good idea originated. When the ego and thinking are treated as the same thing there is a reluctance to be wrong and a need to defend a point of view rather than to explore the situation. A person should be able to treat his thinking much as a tennis player treats his strokes: he should be able to walk off the court complaining that his backhand was not working very well on that occasion or that it required more practice.
This new meta-system is very much in favour of the self, but a self that is based on a proper sense of dignity, not on an inflated ego. A person who dare not admit he is wrong inflates his ego but weakens his self.
ISBN 0851171257 Copyright
-Edward De Bono, The Happiness Purpose, 1977
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There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.
-Guy Debord
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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
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The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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What will the world be quite overturned when you die?
-Epictetus
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We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best.
-Anatole France
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He who does not think much of himself is much more esteemed than he imagines.
-Johann von Goethe
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Mastery passes often for egotism.
-Johann von Goethe
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The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.
-Lucille S. Harper
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Egotism is the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.
-George V. Higgins
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An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
-Frank Leahy
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Loving is the only sure road out of darkness, the only serum known that cures self-centeredness.
-Roger M'Ckuen
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When Jerry Lewis and I were big, we used to go to parties, and everybody thought I was big-headed and stuck up, and I wasn't. It was because I didn't know how to speak good English, so I used to keep my mouth shut.
-Dean Martin
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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
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Don't talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave.
-Wilson Mizner
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Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.
-Marianne Moore
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One must learn to love oneself with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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If someone is blessed as I am is not willing to clean out the barn, who will?
-H. Ross Perot
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Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
-Colin Powell
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There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania...
-Agnes Repplier
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Channels, psychological and psychic, always exist, sending communications back and forth through the various levels of the self, and the ego accepts necessary information and data from inner portions of the personality without question. Its position in fact depends in a large manner upon this unquestioning acceptance of inner data. The ego, in other words, the
-Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul
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We would rather speak badly of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.
-Fran
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When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package.
-John Ruskin
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Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
-George Santayana
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If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race.
-Alexander Smith
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With the disappearance of God the Ego moves forward to become the sole divinity.
-Dorothee Sölle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance
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If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
-Wallace Stevens
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I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
-Henry David Thoreau
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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
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Books about Ego
