> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Weekend Words: Self
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-self/
- Published: 2013-12-01T15:00:12.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:34:12.000Z
- Description: Not to be outdone by OxfordDictionaries.com, which, as reported by Hyperallergic's Alicia Eler, has selected "selfie" as its new Word of the Year, Weekend Words respectfully centers on the self.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:59 (2012, 2013, part 2)

![self](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/11/self.jpg)

Parmigianino, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (c.1524). Oil on wood, diameter 24,4 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. (Image via Web Gallery of Art)

Not to be outdone by OxfordDictionaries.com, which, as [reported](https://hyperallergic.com/theory-of-the-selfie/) by Hyperallergic’s Alicia Eler, has selected “selfie” as its new Word of the Year, Weekend Words respectfully centers on the self:

> “Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”  
>  
> **—H. L. Mencken**

> “Self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens to stumble upon it.”  
>  
> **—Lord (George Gordon) Byron**

> “Self-love exaggerates our faults as well as our virtues.”  
>  
> **—Johann von Goethe**

> “The self is hateful.”  
>  
> **—Blaise Pascal, *Pensees***

> “It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.”  
>  
> **—George Eliot, *Middlemarch***

> “He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser.”  
>  
> **—Friedrich Nietzsche**

> “We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.”  
>  
> **—Cyril Connolly, *The Unquiet Grave***