Reputation As Extension of Ego
Concern over reputation is sometimes considered a human fault, exaggerated in importance due to the fragile nature of the human ego. William Shakespeare provides the following insights from Othello:
Cassio: Reputation, reputation, reputation! O! I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!
-Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice Act II. Scene III, 242-244.
Iago: As I am an honest man, I thought you had received some bodily wound; there is more offence in that than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving: you have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser.
-Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice Act II. Scene III, 245-249.
Read more about this topic: Reputation
Famous quotes containing the words reputation, extension and/or ego:
“This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.”
—Socrates (469–399 B.C.)
“If you are well off and can afford to spend ten or twenty-five dollars a day to hire some patient soul to listen to your troubles you can be readjusted to the crazy scheme of things and spare yourself the humiliation of becoming a Christian Scientist. You can have your ego trimmed or removed, as you wish, just like a wart or bunion.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)