continuity of self Quotes

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.

In order that a "self" may exist there must be some continuity of mental experiences and, particularly, continuity bridging gaps of unconsciousness. For example, the continuity of our "self" is resumed after sleep, anaesthesia, and the temporary amnesias of concussion and convulsions.

When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories.

We do not gain or surrender our personhood as we age. We live one life from conception to death.

There is no man who is not, at each moment, what he has been and what he will be.

The self is not so much linked to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the same thing as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the self aged fifty is the continuation of the self aged forty.