Sam Keen Quotes

As human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

The narrative of our lives is a total construct. We get to choose what that is. That is something I've realized as I've gotten older. I have a lot of choices about the story that I'm telling myself about my life. So where do I find meaning?

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.

People are the story they tell themselves.

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.

We build our lives in moments, and even the ones we can't remember become the story of who we are.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

You are the effect of your story, that's all.

Every man is the hero of his own song.

This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

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.

We're all the stories we tell ourselves.

Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.

There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.

I have no desire to write my own biography, as long as I have strength and means to do better work.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

We have to have a version of our own story that we keep telling ourselves that allows us to get up in the morning. This version of yourself is what you sell to yourself. I think it necessarily includes ... not looking at certain things. Everybody's got some blind spot.