A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on. We make ourselves and in so doing are the gods of the small universe of self and the large world of repercussions.

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

A human is not a being; he is a becoming. He is an ongoing process, nothing is fixed.

I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born

You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously.

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.

No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and - as a special class within the whole - mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. Through the condition at any moment of its somatic, especially its cerebral system, and through education, and tradition, by word, by writing, by monument, by manners, by a way of life, by a newly shaped environment... by so much that a thousand words would not exhaust it, by all that, I say, the Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty.

The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions

I am not what happens to me. I choose who I become.

Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions. — DALAI LAMA XIV

I am not what happened to me; I am what I choose to become.

Be that self that one is

[T]he full and real self is not the willing and deliberating function but the spontaneous.