{"quotes":[{"text":"Beautiful moments in life need no words for description. Living those moments and feeling the beauty suffices.","author":"Mamur Mustapha","tags":["beauty","feelings","life","moments","nature","people","sense-of-self","time","understanding","words-of-wisdom"],"id":2757,"author_id":"Mamur+Mustapha"},{"text":"There is nothing better in life than commitment to personal development and lifelong learning.","author":"Lailah Gifty Akita","tags":["commit","commitment","commitment-and-attitude","learn","learning","learning-by-doing","learning-from-mistakes","learning-to-live","learning-to-love-yourself","life-and-living","life-changing","life-experience","life-lessons","life-long-learning","life-philosophy","life","person","personal","personal-development","personal-development-insights","personal-planning","personal-responsibility","personalities","personality","purpose","purpose-driven","purpose-driven-life","purpose-in-life","purpose-of-life","purposeful","purposeful-living","purposes","self-of-purpose-driven","sense-of-being","sense-of-freedom","sense-of-humor","sense-of-purpose","sense-of-self","sense-of-touch","sense-of-wonder"],"id":5750,"author_id":"Lailah+Gifty+Akita"},{"text":"O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae monie a blunder free us,An' foolish notion.","author":"Robert Burns","tags":["embarrassment","error","foolishness","perception","sense-of-self"],"id":8710,"author_id":"Robert+Burns"},{"text":"To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.","author":"Ruth Ozeki","tags":["buddhism","japanese","life","meditation","physics","quantum-mechanics","science","sense-of-self","spirituality"],"id":9434,"author_id":"Ruth+Ozeki"},{"text":"My sense of self has expanded and contracted like a schizophrenic accordion. I have questioned everything, and I have felt nothing. I have told the universe to f**k off, and I have fallen down weeping at its compassionate response.","author":"Sera J. Beak","tags":["sense-of-self","universe"],"id":16954,"author_id":"Sera+J.+Beak"},{"text":"Unlike simple stress, trauma changes your view of your life and yourself. It shatters your most basic assumptions about yourself and your world — “Life is good,” “I’m safe,” “People are kind,” “I can trust others,” “The future is likely to be good” — and replaces them with feelings like “The world is dangerous,” “I can’t win,” “I can’t trust other people,” or “There’s no hope.","author":"Mark Goulston","tags":["dangerous-world","lack-of-trust","post-traumatic-stress-disorder","posttraumatic-stress-disorder","ptsd","sense-of-self","shattered-souls","stress","trauma","traumatic-stress","work-view"],"id":23247,"author_id":"Mark+Goulston"},{"text":"Up until then it had only been himself. Up to then it had been a private wrestle between him and himself. Nobody else much entered into it. After the people came into it he was, of course, a different man. Everything had changed then and he was no longer the virgin, with the virgin's right to insist upon platonic love. Life, in time, takes every maidenhead, even if it has to dry it up; it does not matter how the owner wants to keep it. Up to then he had been the young idealist. But he could not stay there. Not after the other people entered into it.","author":"James Jones","tags":["autonomy","emotions","indifference","sense-of-self","virginity"],"id":60519,"author_id":"James+Jones"},{"text":"It doesn't really matter how you feel about your character, it just matters what you do with it.","author":"Kiera Cass","tags":["advice","character","sense-of-self"],"id":73782,"author_id":"Kiera+Cass"},{"text":"One way to think of this dignity is to equate when you are on the path with unraveling a ball of yarn. You have wound your sense of self so tightly that it's hard to be anything other than you, a big ball of yarn. That's just who you are, not string, or threads, but a ball of yarn.","author":"Lodro Rinzler","tags":["buddhism","identity","sense-of-self"],"id":95639,"author_id":"Lodro+Rinzler"},{"text":"It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child's. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.","author":"Emma Cline","tags":["death","depression","disillusionment","life","loneliness","passage-of-time","sense-of-self"],"id":128173,"author_id":"Emma+Cline"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":34,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}