Source: 1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)
Context: Life has its beginning and its maturity comes into being when an individual rises above self to something greater. Few individuals learn this, and so they go through life merely existing and never living. Now you see signs all along in your everyday life with individuals who are the victims of self-centeredness. They are the people who live an eternal “I.” They do not have the capacity to project the “I” into the “Thou." They do not have the mental equipment for an eternal, dangerous and sometimes costly altruism. They live a life of perpetual egotism. And they are the victims all around of the egocentric predicament. They start out, the minute you talk with them, talking about what they can do, what they have done. They’re the people who will tell you, before you talk with them five minutes, where they have been and who they know. They’re the people who can tell you in a few seconds, how many degrees they have and where they went to school and how much money they have. We meet these people every day. And so this is not a foreign subject. It is not something far off. It is a problem that meets us in everyday life. We meet it in ourselves, we meet in other selves: the problem of selfcenteredness.
“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
Source: Ulysses
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James Joyce 191
Irish novelist and poet 1882–1941Related quotes
“To this day, when men meet me, there's always that movie in the back of their mind.”
On The Graduate, " Anne Bancroft Finds Her Own Way Back http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/theater/theater-anne-bancroft-finds-her-own-way-back.html?pagewanted=2", interview with Peter Marks in the New York Times (17 February 2002).
Address to the Women's Canadian Club, Montreal, Quebec, March 26, 1958
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)
“Every day we are changing, every day we are dying, and yet we fancy ourselves eternal.”
Quotidie morimur, quotidie commutamur, et tamen aternos nos esse credimus.
Letter 60; Translated by W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W.G. Martley. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 6. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001.htm
Letters
The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
Source: Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment
2010s, Democratic National Convention speech (2012)