Quotes on Ego

Meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using the ego to observe and tame its own manifestations.

It is one of the greatest problems. It will appear very paradoxical, but this is true - before you can lose your ego, you must attain it. Only a ripe fruit falls to the ground. Ripeness is all. An unripe ego cannot be thrown, cannot be destroyed. And if you struggle with an unripe ego to destroy and dissolve it, the whole effort is going to be a failure. Rather than destroying it, you will find it more strengthened, in new and subtle ways.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.

And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO

The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something.

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.

My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.

This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.

To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones.

A bad day for the ego is a good day for the soul.

Whenever ego suffers from fear of death & your practice turns to seeing impermanence, ego settles down.

Did Buddha teach that the many was real and the ego unreal, while orthodox Hinduism regards the One as the real, and the many as unreal?" the Swami was asked. "Yes", answered the Swami. "And what Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and I have added to this is, that the Many and the One are the same Reality, perceived by the same mind at different times and in different attitudes.

Fifteen minutes of fame doesn't make a career. An article in a magazine, newspaper, interview on television or multiple print ads may stroke your ego, but nothing much else. An artist's career is a lifetime venture. Just because an artist is on top doesn't mean they are sheltered from a crash. As has been stated, the higher you climb, the harder you fall.

Pride is one of the socially acceptable sins in some corners of the evangelical culture. It's just straight-out ego gratification - how important I am; whether my name gets on the building or on the TV program or in the magazine article.

You proceed from a false assumption: I have no ego to bruise.

The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.

I'd been out to a lot of people since 19. I wish to God it had happened then. I don't think I would have the same career - my ego might not have been satisfied in some areas - but I think I would have been a happier man.

You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, 'Come on, you know, there's life and there's death and there is love.' And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.

Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves.

As long as the "I" is there, love cannot be. All that we call love is only desire, longing, passion and attachment; as long as ego is there, all these bind one.