The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Lionel Trilling

There are so many separate selves; no one who writes creatively hasn't felt that.
Jeanette Winterson

There are still people who believe in that and wake up every day believing it's possible, and invest their whole selves in that.
Todd Rundgren

To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in which our personal selves are wrapped up.
George H. Mead

Truth is not a matter of fact but a state of harmony with progress and hope. Enveloped only in its wings will we ever soar to the promise of our greater selves.
Bryant H. McGill

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
Thomas Merton

We shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves.
Rowan Williams

We're very physical creatures, and we worry about how we look sometimes more than our spiritual selves.
Smokey Robinson

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign in solitude.
William Wordsworth

When we discover that the truth is already in us, we are all at once our original selves.
Dogen

Woodrow Wilson called for leaders who, by boldly interpreting the nation's conscience, could lift a people out of their everyday selves. That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership.
James MacGregor Burns