
Source: The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening
Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 60
Context: I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence … And so I lift up my head, and I bear my own witness, with affection and tenderness and respect. And in so doing, I sanctify myself with my own grace.
Source: The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening
Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)
Context: The human mind in all countries having gone to the uttermost limit of its own capacity, flushed with its conquests, haughty after its self-assertion upon emerging from the prior dark age, is now nearing a new phase, a phase inherent in the nature and destiny of things.
The human mind, like the silk-worm oppressed with the fullness of its own accumulation, has spun about itself gradually and slowly a cocoon that at last has shut out the light of the world from which it drew the substance of its thread. But this darkness has produced the chrysalis, and we within the darkness feel the beginning of our throes. The inevitable change, after centuries upon centuries of preparation, is about to begin.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
“Universe is the Sun watching its own self.”
“Hearthstone,” p. 39
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: "Forgotten Place”
“743. As Virtue is its own Reward, so Vice is its own Punishment.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“The impulse to create is pure, self sufficient, its own reward or punishment.”
A Proper Gentleman, 1977
“Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.”
Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Context: Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.
Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 6, The Viable Governor, p. 154.
“The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.”
Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 1
“The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content.”
Source: A Stranger in Olondria (2013), Chapter 17, “The House of the Horse, My Palace” (p. 248)