relationships and community on Self-Consciousness

Emma Darwin, a devoted wife to Charles, did not share his passion for science, nor did she pretend to be captivated by the many lectures and events she attended by his side. On one occasion, as they s...

There are some stories that continue to be told generations after they were originally written. The tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table still captivates those eager to hear about a ...

A few years ago, a journalist named Joseph Blackman wrote an Op Ed on an interesting subject, “Why Clubs are Dark.” That is, why is it when you walk into a nightclub or a bar, the lights are off, or a...

There is not any thing, relating to men and characters, more surprising and unaccountable, than this partiality to themselves. . . . Hence it is that many men seem perfect strangers to their own chara...

We spend the whole of our whole lives watching ourselves. But when a man becomes meek he has finished/

At this very moment you and I are either committing [selfishness], or about to commit it, or repenting it.

What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?

Love . . . is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that ...

To observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.”

Since her first grief had brought her fully to birth and wakefulness in this world, an unstinting compassion had moved in her, like a live stream flowing deep underground, by which she knew herself an...

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.

Selfishness is the making a man's self his own centre, the beginning and end of all he doeth.

Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues...you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity...you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to...

But it is important to be aware that the act of judging others has its origins in our self-judgment. As I often tell patients, “Shamed people shame people.” Long before we are criticizing others, the ...

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

The True Self is all about right relationship, not requirements. It’s not about being correct; it’s about being connected, which you always were—you just didn’t realize it.

Desires are best understood as our most honest experiences of ourselves, in all our complexity and depth, as we relate to people and things around us

My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.

When science finally locates the center of the universe, some people will be surprised to learn they’re not it.

The pyschologist Carl Rogers, a person who would know quite well the interior lives of others, has this to say of our inmost thoughts: I have most invariably found that the very feeling which has see...

A man is hindered and distracted in proportion as he draws outward things to himself.

If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is not really about, it is about us. Through our cause we are getting a self, our worth. That means we MUST ...

Evading self-acknowledgment of our faults enables us to avoid painful moral emotions: guilt and remorse for harming others; shame for betraying your own ideals; self-contempt for not meeting even our ...

You never really know a person until you know how that person perceives himself. I’m sure you have had experi­ences like I’ve had when you were sharing with another person, and that sharing became dee...

I was shy by nature, and rendered worse in that respect by a consciousness of my own ugliness. I am certain that nothing so much influences the development of a man as his exterior—though the exterior...

Despite all we know about shame, containing it, let alone disposing of it, is a bit like grasping for mercury: the more pressure you use to seize it, the more evasive it becomes . . . It is ubiquitous...

That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.