Having ones image, and effectively, life, democratized, dehumanizes and sometimes objectifies it into an entertainment product. What sort of valuation of the ego would one have once youve let it been preyed upon by the public for years and years? Perhaps, it becomes truly just skin and bones.

There aren’t many honest men or women in Washington anymore. Politicians get where they are by the sheer force of their egos, not their convictions. And you know what? It’s our fault as voters. We don’t demand better candidates, so we end up getting what we deserve—on both sides of the aisle.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

Malick is so far on the other side of the spectrum in terms of his character. Malick is a complete recluse, and not at all driven by ego or championing who he is as an individual. It's all about the art. Whereas Herzog is constantly placing himself into the engine. Malick is such a gentle poet.

The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.

You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, 'Come on, you know, there's life and there's death and there is love.' And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.

I think you can make fun of anything except things people can't help. They can't help their race or their sex or their age, so you ridicule their pretension or their ego instead. You can ridicule ideas - ideas don't have feelings. You can ridicule an idea that someone holds without hurting them.

You've got to know what your 'thing' is, and you've got to call it a 'thing,' whether it's meanness, nastiness, un-forgiveness, arrogance, ego, resistance, rebelliousness or defiance. Everybody's got a 'thing,' and once you call your 'thing' a 'thing,' we can give it a place to be or dismiss it.

What one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous - that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.

Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.

Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it’s purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it’s going to fail.

The ego is nothing but condensed unawareness. When you become aware by and by that condensed unawareness we call 'ego' disappears. Just as if you bring a lamp into the room - and the darkness disappears. Awareness is the lamp, the lamp we were talking about the first day. Be a lamp unto yourself.

It's the band that really counts and not our egos. Egos probably destroyed more bands than anything else did, and that's something we want to avoid at all costs. We want to give the audience something real, something spectacular, and if it would be about egos, it would hardly be worth their time.

I want you," he muttered. "Get rid of him and take me. The only risk is losing someone you don't have anyway. He's not what you need, Ella. I am" "Unbelievable," I said in disgust. "What's unbelievable?" "Your ego. It's surrounded by its own cloud of antimatter. You're a black hole of...of hubris!

We have a mind, but we are the consciousness within the body and mind. I'm in my body but I am the eternal soul full of knowledge and bliss, unborn and undying. And the natural quality of the soul, uncovered from the ego and all our misconceptions, is unconditional love for the all-beautiful Lord.

I is a great prison. It is your slavery and bondage to the mind. The moment you enter beyond the mind, you are - but you don`t have any notion of being an ego, of being an I. In other words: the more you think you are, the less you are; the more you experience that you are not... the more you are.

My own observation is: lovers don't surrender to each other, they surrender to something unknown that exists between them. They surrender to love - call it the 'god of love' - they both surrender to the god of love. Hence nobody's ego is fulfilled by your surrender; both the egos disappear in love.

The inanity of her remark infuriated him. 'Good grief don't you understand Janet? At this point I'm thoroughly delusional. I'm as mentally ill as it's possible to be. It's incredible that I can communicate with you at all. It's a credit to my ego-strength that I'm not at this point totally autistic.

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves. This is a helpful pointer for our everyday presence-practice. Can you catch yourself angrily defending your point of view or attacking the other person's? There's the ego.

This avoidance of the difficult things of Scripture — of sinfulness and hell and God’s notable severity — is idolatrous and cowardly. If a man or a woman who teaches the Scriptures is afraid to explain to you the severity of God, they have betrayed you, and they love their ego more than they love you.

Under the bright sun, many of us are gathered together with different languages, different styles of dress, even different faiths. However, all of us are the same in being humans, and we all uniquely have the thought of 'I' and we're all the same in wanting happiness and in wanting to avoid suffering.

Memory is a dead thing. Memory is not truth and cannot ever be, because truth is always alive, truth is life; memory is persistence of that which is no more. It is living in ghost world, but it contains us, it is our prison. In fact it is us. Memory creates the knot, the complex called the I and the ego

The ego promotes turmoil because it wants to substantiate your separateness from everyone, including God. It will push you in the direction of judgment and comparison, and cause you to insist on being right and best. You know your highest self by listening to the voice that only wants you to be at peace.

I find my own pain and others' difficult to tolerate, so I always want to try to shift things so they'll be better. But in doing that, if I am coming from a place of ego, I often cause harm. So it's a struggle for me to set my ego outside and find a softer and more compassionate way of approaching things.

What I love about the way they both [Paul Thomas Anderson and Joaquin Phoenix] work is that all of the monkey business is on film. There's no monkey business outside of the monkey business of making the movie. There's no ego bullshit, there's no wasted energy. It's all directed at the story and that's rare.

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.

Have the courage to speak your mind and tell the truth from a position of love rather than anger or fear, being open to accept the views of others without feeling threatened or defeated, relinquishing the ego's need to be in control by demonstrating the willingness to do whatever it takes to establish peace.

We must learn to outgrow our egos in exchange for constructive dialogue rather than debate. In addition, we must be capable of stating problems and proposing solutions clearly and succinctly, without distortion of meaning or misunderstanding, even when these solutions are radically opposed to accepted norms.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the 'cortical homunculus' of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces

Since the so-called Age of Enlightenment, our shaky anthropocentric, rationalist egos have been brainwashed to forget what 'primitive' cultures once understood: Animals can be manifestations of celestial beings in disguise; they possess supernatural abilities, and they can be our spiritual guides and healers.

Ego is the movement of the mind toward objects of perception in the form of grasping, and away from objects in the form of aversion. This fundamentally is all the ego is. This movement of grasping and aversion gives rise to a sense of a separate 'me,' and in turn the sense of 'me' strengthens itself this way.

In religion, there's a certain type of fear that if somebody believes differently from me, that it's a threat. Because I'm right, and there cannot be two ways that are right, so if I'm right, anything different than this must be wrong; and we attack those things and it's really due to insecurity, ego and fear.

Your language, dear," Victoria reproved gently. "A lady never curses in public. There are much better ways to handle the delicate male ego." Keiley paused. "With a two-by-four?" she asked. Victoria's lips pursed a smile tugged at her lips. "Only as a last resort," she murmured humorously. "And never in public.

I am a bit difficult to be around sometimes. I can be stubborn on a lot of things, and I'm set, but I can also adapt in a conflict situation and don't hold on to an ego. I end up seeing the larger good and adapt to it, provided it benefits me. I may come across as a cold person, but I am extremely sentimental.

There are only two states of consciousness that exist - the state of the ego and the state of love. The ego is the narrow state, the seed-form, the atomic stage; love is all encompassing, love is God. The center of the ego is I; the ego exists for itself. The nectar of love is the universe. Love exists for all.

Extreme narcissists exaggerate their achievements and talents, and so Trump has spent his life building up a false image of himself - not just for others, but for himself, to protect his deeply fragile ego. He lies endlessly, not just in the way sociopaths do, which is to con others, but also to delude himself.

I've been told I have the biggest ego in the world and that it manifests itself when you come to me and say, 'I don't like this' or 'I want a change'... and that I relish that because my ego's so big I think I can solve whatever you throw at me and make it even better. I enjoy the interaction and the challenge.

"It almost always happens that people enjoy a few moments and then afterwards feel very guilty. The guilt arises because of the ego. The ego starts torturing them, "What are you doing? Have you decided to kill me? And I am your only treasure. Killing me? You will be destroyed. Killing me is destroying yourself."

For what we don't realize today is just what the typical self of every previous stage failed likewise to comprehend: this is not the highest and greatest mode of consciousness which can be attained - there lie ahead the realms of the superconscious and the pitiful ego, by comparison, is as a speck of nothingness.

The great thing with film is that it doesn't have an ego. It's just a film. Everybody that makes them has an ego, and the problem with awards and stuff like that is that it always affects the egos, and everyone gets stained by it in some way. And that can be fine and very innocent, but it can be horrible as well.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

If your ego starts out, 'I am important, I am big, I am special,' you're in for some disappointments when you look around at what we've discovered about the universe. No, you're not big. No, you're not. You're small in time and in space. And you have this frail vessel called the human body that's limited on Earth.

I don't know why people don't want to talk about their numbers. I guess in a sense, there's a bit of performer nudity, a bit of ego nudity when you expose your numbers, I guess because someone's are higher or someone's are lower. I've never really talked about the numbers with anyone, so maybe I'm not supposed to.

Happiness is threatening and misery is safe - safe for the ego. Ego can exist only in misery and through misery. Ego is an island surrounded by hell; happiness is threatening to the ego, to the very existence of the ego. Happiness rises like a sun and the ego disappears, evaporates like a dewdrop on the grass leaf.

The mind in its foolishness thinks that it is working in this body. Why should I be bound by one system of nerves, and put the Ego only in one body, if the mind is omnipresent? There is no reason why I should.[Source] The root of that degeneration is egotism - to think that one is just as great as any other, indeed!

Do you laugh in the right places? Then, you’ll get along, in fair weather or foul. Humor is nothing less than a sense of the fitness of things. Something that’s out of proportion, like an inflated ego, should strike you funny, particularly if it’s your own inflated ego. Otherwise you are pathetic and quite hopeless.

True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.

Funnily enough, I feel the most free to be myself when I'm not doing my solo project. Whenever I'm in a situation when it's a side thing or it's something not so infused with my ego. When I'm all over everything, it's a big responsibility and half the time leaves me in some weird nether state of insecurity and doubt.

In terms of the ego, most religions teach in some way that all of us must die before we die, and then we will not be afraid of dying. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as whenever you are not in control.

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