Bill McKibben Quotes

One of the beautiful things about Tyler Durden in 'Fight Club' is that he seems to understand the implicit vanity and self-absorption that comes with the desire to improve oneself.

[For American consumer society], the country's reserves of ignorance constitute a natural resource as precious as the Mississippi River or the long-lost herds of buffalo.

I spent thirty-three years in another man's shadow. I went everywhere he went, I helped him with everything he did. I was in a sense a part of him. When you live like that for a long time, you gradually lose track of what it is you yourself really want out of life

What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping. I've lived too long where I can be reached.

I'm a strange person. Sometimes I hardly know what I'm going to do or say next. Sometimes I seem a stranger to myself. Sometimes what I do surprises me and I can't understand why I do it.

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

God pity us indeed, for we are human, And do not always see, The vision when it comes, the shining change, Or, if we see it, do not follow it, Because it is too hard, too strange, too new, Too unbelievable, too difficult, Warring too much with common, easy ways, And now I know this, standing in this light, Who have been half alive these many years, Brooding on my own sorrow, my own pain, Saying "I am a barren bough. Expect, Nor fruit nor blossom from a barren bough."

The name, his true name, was weaker and more flawed than he would have liked, and he hated himself for that, but there was also much to admire within it, and the more he thought about it, the more he was able to accept the true nature of his self. He was not the best person in the world, but neither was he the worst.

Once I know who I'm not, then I'll know who I am.

The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us. The worst part is, you can't even tell who is who.

I am not myself; I am the potential of myself.

Trust allows you to follow your feelings through your defenses to their sources, and to bring to the light of consciousness those aspects of yourself that resist wholeness, that live in fear.

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

And I wonder: Have I squandered my dogness? Have I forsaken my nature for my desires? Have I made a mistake by anticipating my future and shunning my present?

I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.

I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.

I spent so many years trying to become an actor, trying to be a person that I wasn't.

I have no more idea now of who I am than I did before. But at least I know that. And I'm starting to figure out who I want to be.

You get more insight as you get older, on everything. I kind of woke up one morning and was like, 'Oh I see what's happening, I get everything'. I woke up and was like, 'I get it, I'm a product'.

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. From within, I couldn't decide what to do. Unable to see, I heard my name being called. Then I walked outside.

Sometimes you can get so far in yourself that you don't know who you are.

When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don't know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!