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The mere attempt to examine my own confusion
would consume volumes.
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-James Agee
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*And yet I find,
Repeating in my head;
If I can't be my own,
I'd feel better dead.
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-Alice In Chains (Layne Staley-lyrics, Jerry
Cantrell, Sean Kinney, Mike Inez)
Jar of Flies, 1993
"Nutshell"
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The question which one asks oneself begins, at
last, to illuminate the world, and becomes one's keys to the experience of
others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this
confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion.
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-James Baldwin
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Imitation is part of finding your own voice.
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-Raymond Carver
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Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump;
you may be freeing him from being a camel.
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-G.K. Chesterton
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. . .my sense of my own importance to myself is
tremendous. I am all I have, to work with, to play with, to suffer and to
enjoy. It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of, but my own.
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-Noel Coward
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*Unamuno, former president of
the University of Salamanca and a noted Spanish philosopher, in one of his
essays points out that the Spanish John Smith (Juan Lopéz), if he has no other
source of pride, will be inordinately proud that he is Juan Lopéz, because in
the whole world there can be no other Juan Lopéz exactly like him. All of the
qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, that have combined to form his
personality will never again reunite in precisely the same proportions in any
other individual.
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-John A. Crow
Spain: The Root and the Flower, An
Interpretation of Spain and the Spanish People, Third Edition, Expanded and
Updated, 1963
"The Land: The People"
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There are many things in your heart you can
never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows,
and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself,
when you tell them.
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-Greta Garbo
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Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.
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-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If you hate a person, you hate something in him
that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb
us.
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-Herman Hesse
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*We all have a face that we
hide away forever,
And we take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone.
Some are satin, some are steel, some are silk and some are leather.
They're the faces of the stranger and we love to try them on.
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-Billy Joel
The Stranger, 1977
"The Stranger"
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I don't know who my grandfather was. I am
much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.
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-Abraham Lincoln
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We can help one another to find out the
meaning of life, no doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person is
responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' Others can
give you a name or number, but they can never tell you who you really are.
That is something only you yourself can discover from within.
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-Thomas Merton
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The deepest personal defeat suffered by human
beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of
becoming and what one in fact became.
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-Ashley Monatgu
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You aren't born with yourself. You are born
facing a mass of possibilities, a mass of other people's ideas and
preconceptions--and you have to mold a self by working through those raw
materials.
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-V.S. Naipul
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*Come, as you are, as you
were, as I want you to be.
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-Nirvana (Kurt Cobain, lyrics, David Grohl,
Chris Novoselic)
Nevermind, 1991
"Come As You Are"
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If you really knew me, if you knew my secrets,
my insecurities, my fears, my feelings of inadequacy, my shame, my guilt, my
imperfections, then you'd reject me and I'd feel even more alone. So I'll
only show those parts of myself that I think are likable and loveable.
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-Dean Ornish
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*[T]he only direct,
introspective knowledge of man anyone possesses is of himself.
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-Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead, 1943
"Introduction to Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition", May, 1968
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*I am a collection of water,
calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter V, "Blues For a Red Planet"
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~Between these
two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory in common, but all
other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was
composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto,
projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was
indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers
the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a
father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference. To cast in my lot
with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged
and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a
thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever,
despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still
another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly
in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he
had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as
old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die
for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls
with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was
found wanting in the strength to keep to it.
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-Henry Jekyll, the main character in Robert
Louis Stevenson's
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, 1886
Ch. 10, "Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case"
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