Quotes about Egotism

'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God' suggested to me a heavenly welfare program for the meek. Today that saying reveals an astute insight into egotism, about how those with swollen pride or vanity cannot see anything larger than themselves.

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

If you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego and the internal dialogue. Make a decision to relinquish the need to control, the need to be approved, and the need to judge. Those are the three things the ego is doing all the time. It's very important to be aware of them every time they come up.

If you ask me which is the real hereditary sin of human nature, do you imagine I shall answer pride, or luxury, or ambition, or egotism? No; I shall say indolence. Who conquers indolence will conquer all the rest. Indeed all good principles must stagnate without mental activity.

Opinions scattered indiscriminately about leave the mark of egotism.

And the trouble with me is that my ego just can't accept a loss. I suppose that if I were more perfectly adjusted, I would toss off defeat, but my name is on this ball club. Thirty-six men publicly reflect me and reflect on me, and it's a matter of my pride.

Fame is a cancer and ego: its seed.

I give to my friends the assurance that if they will recast their ideas and attitudes about the relative importance of the spiritual to the material, and bring themselves to participate in the mighty cause of establishing God's kingdom in the earth, they will find a satisfaction, a sureness of purpose, a peace and contentment, surpassing anything they have ever known. They will not be ashamed to say to themselves and to their fellows that God and his work come first. When they can develop the faith and the courage to make this acknowledgment, self-sufficiency and egotism will be replaced by humility of spirit. The brotherhood of man will become real to them. Their service will be ennobled, and they will lay the foundation for the attainment of the highest rewards and blessings vouchsafed to humanity.

If there is an enemy, it is the ego. If there is a devil, it is the ego. Every obstacle is created by the ego, for the ego. Every obstacle. The ego can be overcome, and in so doing are you made free. That is the way.

To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each others's joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it's safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each other's best, you work very hard at hosing all the bull-shit out of your head so that it's clean enough for guests, silencing all the demons in your subconscious so that it's quiet enough to hear people thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick together and love each other, and keep growing.

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. . . . Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of "I" and "mine," self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. . . . The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. . . . {The ego's greatest triumph} is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us.

The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in its continual living experience of presence, in its bliss, clarity, peace, and most important of all, complete absence of grasping. The diminishing of grasping in yourself is a sign that you are becoming freer of yourself. And the more you experience this freedom, the clearer the sign that the ego and the hopes and fears that keep it alive are dissolving, and the closer you will come to the infinitely generous "wisdom of egolessness." When you live in the wisdom home, you'll no longer find a barrier between "I" and "you," "this" and "that," "inside" and "outside;" you'll have come, finally, to your true home, the state of non-duality.

It is important to remember always that the principle of egolessness does not mean that there was an ego in the first place, and the Buddhists did away with it. On the contrary, it means there was never any ego at all to begin with. To realize that is called "egolessness."

Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to. . . . you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide. Because he or she knows you through and through, since he or she is you, your guide can help you, with increasing clarity and humor, negotiate all the difficulties of your thoughts and emotions. . . . The more often you listen to this wise guide, the more easily you will be able to change your negative moods yourself, see through them, and even laugh at them for the absurd dramas and ridiculous illusions that they are. . . . The more you listen, the more guidance you will receive. If you follow the voice of your wise guide . . . and let the ego fall silent, you come to experience that presence of wisdom and joy and bliss that you really are.

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

Where id was, there shall ego be.

The ego is not master in its own house.

With me all is well -Ego me bene habeo

People say "I want peace." If you remove I (ego), and your want (desire), you are left with peace.

Following the Smell of Flowers As told by Taisen Deshimaru Roshi A master was walking in the mountains. When he came back, one of his disciples asked him: "Master, where do you go to walk? "In the mountain" Answered the master. The disciple insisted, "But what path did you take? What did you see?" The master answered, "I followed the smell of flowers, and I wandered with the young shoots." We must let ourselves be guided by the dharma of the Buddha and have confidence in the grass and the flowers that grow, without goal or ego, naturally and unconsciously. The master's answer flows from the spring of wisdom. True wisdom is created beyond knowledge and memory.

The great charm of cats is their rampant egotism, their devil may care attitude toward responsibility, and their disinclination to earn an honest dollar.

An empire is an immense egotism.

Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.

In the woods we return to reason and faith. Standing on the bare ground - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. . . . The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

To men and women who want to do things, there is nothing quite so driving as the force of an imprisoned ego. . . . All genius comes from this class.

What keeps you motivated? The challenge of putting all the elements of a team together and seeing how you do and what you become is the thing that I still enjoy. I also enjoy the associations and relationships with the players and other coaches - to be in the arena, so to speak. I still enjoy that. I'm also at the point, though, that if we're not doing well - it's tough enough as it is - that I'm not going to be hanging on just to be hanging on. Because it's not anything I need from an ego standpoint or anything else. I just thoroughly enjoy what I'm doing.

The new life created by the final integration is self-aware yet without ego, capable of inhabiting a body yet not attached to it, and guided by wisdom rather than emotion. Whole and virtuous, it can never die.

Can you dissolve your ego? Can you abandon the idea of self and other? Can you relinquish the notions of male and female, short and long, life and death? Can you let go of all these dualities and embrace the Tao without skepticism or panic? If so, you can reach the heart of the Integral Oneness.

The ego is entranced by ... names and ideas... (However) names and concepts only block your perception of this Great Oneness. Therefore it is wise to ignore them. Those who live inside their egos are continually bewildered.