Josiah Royce Quotes

There's nothing harder than defining oneself.

I have always felt that I am the sum total of my parts.

The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something.

When you have a lot of people telling you what you are and perceiving you in a certain way, it's difficult to find your own identity.

I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

I know what my identity is.

My identity will always inform my experience and shape my perception. But I am an unremarkable person.

I'm interested in how we understand ourselves in our relatioships and how we define ourselves.

Self-percepts foster actions that generate information, as well as serve as a filtering mechanism for self-referent information in the self-maintaining process

Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others

The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle.

The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.

The first question in any interactive process with another is: now Who Am I, and Who Do I Want to Be, in relationship to that?

The ego is like too many dark clouds around the sun - the sun gets lost

it takes a lot of rehearsal to become yourself.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

Every decision you make - every decision that you make every second - is not a decision about what to do, it is a decision about who you are. Every act is an act of self-definition.

I have managed to establish an identity that is based on my internal self, and for that I feel tremendously lucky.

One builds one's life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.

The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.

To deny our pasts is to burn the bridge we must cross to self-understanding.

It's important to be self-aware about what people are saying about you, but even more so, be very aware of who you actually are, and to have that be the main priority.