not itself QUOTES

1 " For every relationship involves two related terms. Sometimes relationships are not real in either term, but arise from the way we think of the terms: we think identity, for example, by thinking one thing twice over and relating it to itself; and occasionally we relate what exists to what does not exist, or generate purely logical relations like that of genus to species. Sometimes relationships are real in both terms: grounded in the quantity of both, in the case of relationships like big/small or double/half, or in their activity and passivity, in the case of causal relationships, like mover-moved and father/son. Sometimes relationships are real in only one of the terms, with the other merely thought of as related [reciprocally] to that one; and this happens whenever the two terms exist at different levels. Thus seeing and understanding really relates us to things, but being seen and understood by us is not something real in the things; and similarly a pillar to the right of us does not itself have a left and a right. "

― Thomas Aquinas , Summa Theologica

2 " A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at bottom comes up." ―Epigrams and Interludes, Section 79 "

3 " The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but
we have been a long time on the way. "

― Seneca

4 " The greatest artist does not have any concept
Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain
Within its excess, though only
A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it. "

― Michelangelo Buonarroti , Sonnets of Michelangelo

5 " Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night's rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue—if the latter does not itself cease—fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramifications and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations. "

― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way

6 " And now none of it could be undone. That was the exquisite irony: the act that had undone everything could not itself be undone. "

― Paul Russell , The Coming Storm