If I was having a bad day, eating was like self-medicating. But if you abuse food, you still have to use that substance that you abuse every day. You have to learn to use it responsibly.
The all-embracing vast being which is there behind the play of the universe and with which you will have to identify yourself - for this is your true self.
My work will be finished if I succeed in carrying conviction to the human family that every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty.
Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
We ought not to extract pernicious honey from poison blossoms of misrepresentation and mendacious half-truth, to pamper the course appetite of bigotry and self-love.
It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.
The following of authority is the denial of intelligence. [It] may help us temporarily to cover up our difficulties and problems; but to avoid a problem is only to intensify it, and in the process, self-knowledge and freedom are abandoned.
Love is a state of being, and in that state, the 'me', with its identifications, anxieties, and possessions is absent. Love cannot be, as long as the activities of the self, of the 'me', whether conscious or unconscious, continue to exist.
The master not only governs the slave without his consent, but he governs him by a set of rules altogether different from those which he prescribes for himself. Allow ALL the governed an
equal voice in the government, and that, and that only, is self-government.
If we continue to think and live as if we belong only to different cultures and different religions, with separate missions and goals, we will always be in self-defeating competition with each other. Once we realize we are all members of humanity, we will want to compete in the spirit of love.