Self Absorption Quotes

“But if you tell folks you're a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you're talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn't work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The fragmentation of our awareness may trigger dizzying vertigo in the chaos of our living. As such, an overwhelming flurry of connectivity and images generate thereby an oversaturation in our brain and the overabundance makes us anxious, fractured and insecure. This might, in turn, actuate us to cut the wire with the world and stumble into an estranging and contentious cocoon of self-absorption, while off-loading the lush supply of social interaction. Life becomes, then, an intricate maneuvering ground for walking a fine line between sound connectedness and crumbling consciousness, between unflinching cohesion and atomizing fragmentation. ("Give me more images")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Jealousy appears to be a redoubtable pitfall for love, on the toll road of self-absorption and unshareability. When love has to remain cloistered and ostentatiously exclusionary, envy may show its pernicious power, cause wounding harms and unchain emotional twisters. ("Why has Shé got stars in the sky?")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“...It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself, you could have made her blush any day of the year, by telling her she was selfish. She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring bows, of shady bowers and of lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one’s mind was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Honestly, Bessie? People don't care about anyone but themselves. They don't notice anything. They are never looking at what's interesting. They're always looking at themselves.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“The moral climate of pathological self-absorption – hedonistic egotism – defines contemporary society.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Everyone is the most important person in the world to themselves.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“What is the proper relationship between dodgy self-absorption and a quest for perceptive understanding of our own journey? Why do we need to determine who we are? Why do I spend hours attempting to evaluate past performance, reconcile exhibited flaws in my personal character, and atone for reprehensible prior behavior? Why cannot a person be satisfied with just being? People tend to spend more time living inside their head than they do confronting reality. Is a person’s constant internal narrative dialogue a form of catharsis? Is a narrative the most apropos method to comprehend what living entails? Do we seek to tell our own stories in order to interpret and organize the reality of the world that surrounds us? Alternatively, is storytelling simply the easiest way for us to apprehend the tenuous notion of the self? Does storytelling enable us to recognize the translucent thread that connects us to the past?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Being with Karen had made him realize how much the past few days (rather, nights) had changed him. He had always been a loner, but on those nights when he had been Don Juan and Casanova, and yes, de Sade, too, sex was better than it had ever been before. That was what frightened him. for he knew those nights were only masturbatory fantasies that pulled him inward, toward the self, barring the rest of humanity from his life. And he knew that if it continued, it would be harder and harder to return, and ultimately he would want to stay in the dreams forever.”
― Chet Williamson, Hot Blood: Tales of Erotic Horror

“If you are having a hard time sorting through your emotions, perhaps you are spending too much time thinking about yourself and not enough time thinking about… well, everyone else.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year

“Don’t ”be yourself”, but work on yourself. Don’t ”be who you are”, but be who you ought. Don’t ”follow your dreams”, but face your realities. And don’t ”live your life”, but live a respectable life. Then you will find out that you cannot do everything, but at least you have to do something.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“None of them really wanted to listen to someone else's story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“One may expect appreciation, from others, and that one may ignore to appreciate others. Indeed, it reflects openly one's self-absorption.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Youths who were most handsome. Adonis, son of Cinyras and Smyrna, whom Venus [Aphrodite] loved. Endymion, son of Aetolus, whom Luna [Selene] loved. Ganymede, son of Erichthonius, whom Jove [Zeus] loved. Hyacinthus, son of Oebalus, whom Apollo loved. Narcissus, son of the river Cephisus, who loved himself.”
― Hyginus Gromaticus

“I don't even notice the mob until it's rushing toward me.
They snort and pant, ash-colored jackets swirling as their arms and legs pull at the air. A few hundred of them stampede in my direction, and there’s no way to escape. I’m convinced that I’m about to be swept away. I’ll kick, I’ll struggle, but their momentum will be too much for me. They’ll carry me to justice. No escape this time.
But the mob reaches me and keeps moving. They’re heading somewhere, and I just got in their way. I stop fighting, and move in the same direction as everyone else, and soon the crowd shelters me, buries me inside its raucousness.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night

“American citizens are self-absorbed, and the U.S. government devotes its immense resources to achieving the capitalistic demands of its citizenry. Thoughts do not saturate American politics. Corporations employ lobbyist and they fund political action committees that exert inordinate influence in shaping the outcome of this nation’s political agendas. Lobbyist devote their paid for services to sway government officials including legislators and members of regulatory agencies to carry out the programs of powerful corporations and wealthy individuals, granting unprecedented socioeconomic power in the hallowed chambers of the American government to wealthy segments of society. American corporations and affluent people exploit American culture, morals, and religion to push their private interests including inexplicable economic and military incursions into foreign counties. I feel increasingly disenfranchised and unrepresented in America’s supposedly participatory democratic government given the entrenchment of power in a select few. American democracy grants material benefits to the wealthy, vulgarizes the middle class, and ignores the disenfranchised poor. Many Americans applaud prosperous groups exploiting the lower classes, presumably because everyone aspires to become rich. A person and a society that employs vanities and greediness to measure their worthiness is hopelessly doomed. Future historians will venerate an empire that pursued achievement of great deeds based upon virtuous principles. Conversely, the historians of tomorrow will skewer contemporary Americans for their compulsive need to consume the ecosystem and trounce upon the rights of other nations to live peacefully. American vanities and unchecked desire to enjoy an easy life could destroy the world, as we know it.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“i booked a ticket home to watch grandma die but it was my boyfriend's birthday. after the party he said "no one thought you were weird but i think you think you're weird”
― Darcie Wilder, Literally Show Me a Healthy Person

“The need of the hour is self-expansion, not self-absorption.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America

“Self-absorption is not empowerment, it's sophisticated barbarism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Heart Force One: Need No Gun to Defend Society

“If you want to use your body as a tool for transformation then use it as a shield against the inequalities in society, rather than fondling your crotch like a coitus-crazed canine.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Heart Force One: Need No Gun to Defend Society

“You are trapped in you, the beam said.

Yeah, well, who isn’t? she thought.”
― George Saunders, Liberation Day

“Gratification is damnation.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“...usually you can't save people from themselves if they're hell-bent on fucking their lives up through egomaniacal behavior. Some people never appreciate what they have and are always focused on what they don't.”
― Danny Trejo, Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood

“An ego unchecked is like a fire out of control. Keep it in check, and it can be a source of warmth for the soul.”
― Jo P. Helm

“We all wanted to be used by God, but none of us wanted to fold up the chairs afterward.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“...we can't admit we're not God until we look up and see God - in all his glory, in all his otherworldliness, in all his holiness, his set-apartness.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“Although we all begin our transformative practice, if we begin at all, focused entirely on all the good it will do for us as individuals, the long-term effect of these practices is to loosen that inevitable self-absorption and help us to see that liberation is not so much for the self as it is from the self.”
― Dale S. Wright, Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life from the Vimalakirti Sutra

“Working past deeply embedded habits of self-absorption is extremely difficult, precisely because these habits are so much a part of our cumulative character, the result of literally millions of unconscious acts generated out of concern for our own safety and well-being. For this reason, the Vimalakīrti Sūtra insists that practices of generosity must be accompanied by skillfully honed wisdom and that we should always be on the lookout for false forms of generosity.”
― Dale S. Wright, Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life from the Vimalakirti Sutra