Self-Confrontation Quotes

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.

Nor from hell One step no more than from himself can fly By change of place.

To dance at all is to confront oneself. It is the art of honesty.

you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

It's a noisy environment we all live in, whether it's traffic or the workplace, so it's very difficult to think about your life in general. A lot of people are afraid to do that. They like to hide behind their work and not face up to a big problem in their life.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties - all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion - these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

I didn't tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn't understand and could never run away from. It was myself.

When I face myself, I go, "You have a fear of really being on your own. So you know what? That's what we're gonna do right now.

Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks, but other times it results in people making sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else.

We cannot abandon this rabbit hole for fear of a traumatic encounter with our own culture.

What I saw wasn't a ghost. It was simply--myself. I can never forget how terrified I was that night, and whenever I remember it, this thought always springs to mind: that the most frightening thing in the world is our own self. What do you think?

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.

I have a hard time writing. Most writers have a hard time writing. I have a harder time than most because I'm lazier than most. [...] The other problem I have is fear of writing. The act of writing puts you in confrontation with yourself, which is why I think writers assiduously avoid writing. [...] Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. [...] It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It's much more relaxing actually to work.

My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.

He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places. If he wanted to take a shot at it, he’d have to turn the barrel against his own temple.

Sex divorced from love, instead of raising man by taking him away from himself, drags him down to the hall of mirrors where he is always confronted with self. Sex does not care about the person, but about the act. The fig leaf which once was put over the secret parts of man and woman in sculpture is now put over the face. The person does not matter.

Shame is hard to confront. Even if you know it's baseless, it's still hard to come face-to-face with.

The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly, every minute of the day until one dies, is the worst part of oneself.

Facing my addiction was one of the hardest things I've had to do in my life.

By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.

We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

There's a moment for everyone when you fall into your own shadow and the fact is that it's your shadow and you're forced to live in it. And this is nothing to celebrate or not celebrate. It simply is.

As movie monsters go, zombies are the most human. They were human at one time. So we are confronted with ourselves in a way, which is much more frightening and disturbing.

Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?

The price of confessing is to be confronted with the truth of who you are - you have to bear your faults, your frailties.