It's about do or don't do. In social life we are defined by our actions, not by our motives; our thoughts or intentions mean very little unless they lead to action. It's how we behave, or even sometimes how much we make the effort to be nice, that makes the difference.

Who we are and what we do is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

Indeed, most of who we are and how we think—the core material of our personalities—is bound up in implicit memories that are off-limits to the conscious brain.

Our memories make us who we are.

It's very difficult to find out who you are while you're with other people. The reason is that other people are busy all the time telling you who you are in many many ways. By the laws they impose on you. By the behavior ups they set on you. By the things they tell you. By the fact that they always call you by your name and by the fact that when you live among people you have to be in a state of ceaseless chatter. If you want to find out who you are before your father and mother conceived you who you really are, you almost have to go off by yourself - go into the forest and stop talking, even stop thinking words and be absolutely alone and listen to the great silences. And then if you're lucky you recover from the illusion that you're just little me that's so and so.

bodily self       → experience of having a body or being a body from
outside and inside
perspectival self → seeing the world from first person point of view
volitional self   → being the cause of things that happen in
the world
narrative self    → experience of being a continuous and distincive
person over time
social self       → self built on rich set of memories and social
interactions

When the brain uses predictions to control and regulate, we experience how well or how badly that control is going. So our most basic experiences of being a self, of being an embodied organism are deeply grounded in the biological mechanisms that keep us alive.

All our conscious experiences, since they all depend on the same mechanisms of predictive perception, all stem from this basic drive to stay alive.

We experience the world and ourselves with, through and because of out living bodies.

So our experience of the world around us and ourselves within it, well they're kinds of controlled hallucinations that have bin shaped over millions of years of evolution to keep us alive in worlds full of danger and opportunity. We predict ourselves into existence.

We are biological flesh-and-blood animals whose conscious experiences are shaped at all levels by the biological mechanisms that keep us alive.

Our individual self and worlds are unique to each of us, but they're all grounded in biological mechanisms shared with many other living creatures.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. ​ You can't be an object to your own consciousness, at least not in the ordinary way. You are a subject from your own point of view and you can only become an object to the extent that you adopt the attitudes that other people take towards you. Other people from the beginning of life are mirrors and by the way they respond to you, you begin to learn what they think of you and therefore who you are. We all tell each other who we are.

All that you can watch&see, know&judge or touch&taste - is not you, it's outside of you. You are on the other end.

You are the carrier of life.

You are what you identify with.

You are what you consume.

You are what you eat.

You identify, consume and eat what you like.

What you considered to be your body is what you have gathered through ingestion. What you considered to be your mind is what you have gathered through the five senses. What is beyond that - which you did not gather - is who you are.

The оne whо іs wаtсhіng іs yоu, аnd the оne whо іs dоіng іs nоt yоu.

Whatever choice you make makes you. Choose wisely.

You are not in the universe, you are the universe, in intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.

I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.

We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

Suppose you have a play of chess standing on a table and all the pieces are standing there in a beautiful configuration and now you think, how to win the game -- there comes a gust of wind and all the pieces fall down. Now what has been lost -- materially nothing has been lost -- yet everything has been lost. Namely, the configuration that made the whole meaningful. And a self is that which makes me meaningful. It's not my body nor my mind -- it is that which makes me meaningful. If, which will not happen, I would now suddenly die standing here -- I still would be standing for a few minutes and you would think, he sure takes a long time for his next word -- but you won't see a difference. But there is all the difference in the world. That constitutive law within me that made me -- me as my meaning, that has gone. So, the inner self is left which gives meaning to myself and that is that which makes me mature.

What does the hypnotic - and especially the posthypnotic - experiment prove? I proves that we can have thoughts, feelings, wishes, and even sensual sensations which we subjectively feel to be ours, and yet that, although we experience these thoughts and feelings, they have been put into us from the outside, are basically alien, and are not what we think, feel, and so on.

The pseudo self is only an agent who actually represents the role a person is supposed to play but who does so under the name of the self. It is true that a person can play many roles and subjectively be convinced that he is "he" in each role. Actually he is in all these roles what he believes he is expected to be, and for many people, if not most, the original self is completely suffocated by the pseudo self. Sometimes in a dream, in phantasies, or when a person is drunk, some of the original self may appear, feelings and thoughts which the person has not experienced for years. Often they are bad ones which he has repressed because the is afraid or shamed of them. Sometimes, however, they are the very best things in him, which he has repressed because of his fear of being ridiculed or attacked for having such feelings.

The loss of the self and its substitution by a pseudo self leave the individual in an intense state of insecurity. He is obsessed by doubt since, being essentially a reflex of other people's expectation of him, he has in a measure lost his identity. In order to overcome the panic resulting from such loss of identity, he is compelled to conform, to seek his identity by continuous approval and recognition by others. Since he does not know who he is, at least the others will know - if he acts according to their expectation; if they know, he will know too, if he only takes their word for it.

It I am nothing but what I believe I am supposed to be - who am "I"?

Two things define you:
Your patience when you have nothing.
Your attitude when you have everything.

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.