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“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“You do not fear... You do not falter. You do not yield.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin

“But when she was scared, she was a child again, and she was more scared of being a child again than anything else in her life.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson