Quotes About Self-examination

When I'm writing about myself, I write out of a strong urge not to protect myself. When I feel ego or self justification or defensiveness creeping in or a wish to make myself look better than I was, I squelch it, if I can. It takes vigilance. Exposing myself is the only way to go, though. If I'd rather wear veils, I should write fiction.

The minute you see yourself you're forced out of your head and into your body, forced to reckon with yourself as a thing that takes up space in the world, that others can see and react to, that has a story with a beginning, middle, and end that intersects with other peoples stories. A mirror gives you perspective.

I look in the mirror every day, when I brush my teeth or wash my face or comb my hair. It's just I tend to look at myself in pieces and avoid joining them up all together. I don't know why; it just feels safer that way. But tonight I force myself to look at the whole thing. And suddenly I see how the bits and pieces add up to someone I'm not familiar with, someone I never intended to be.

The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.

Before you try to take a speck out of your brother's eye, make sure you don't have a big piece of wood in your own eye, obstructing your vision, Jesus suggested.

I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

Put this all a different way, and perhaps the importance of this fact will become clear: the very key to your growth, development, and evolution is to make your present subject an object—that is, it is to look at your present subject instead of using it as something through which to view the world (and thus remain identified with).

But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in your power whenever you choose to retire into yourself.

I have sounded the very base-string of humility.

Oh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves.

Alas! 'tis true I have gone here and there,And made myself a motley to the view,Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,Made old offenses of affections new.

Must I hold a candle to my shames?

To sit alone with my conscience will be judgment enough for me.

By all means sometimes be alone; salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear; dare to look in thy chest; and tumble up and down what thou findest there.

I pledge to tell you the truth, to be kind, but sometimes to be blunt. Together, let's examine the stories you're making up to see how many of them are based in reality. Personally, prior to the age of 36, almost every story I had was based in a lie. But I'd like you to remember that it doesn't take nearly as many words to tell the truth as it does to bullshit somebody.

We should be careful who we blame for our unhappiness when we ourselves have created the causes for our unhappy experiences.

Look at all the sentences which seem true and question them.

Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

You are maudlin and sentimental, and it is high time you took a rather hard look at yourself and realized you are in danger of becoming ridiculous.

You wanted more from people sometimes. And sometimes,you wanted more from yourself.

We cannot face up to what lies ahead, without facing up to what lies within.

There is no greater delight than to be conscious of sincerity on self-examination.

But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head.

To shorten what otherwise might become a long list of possible points of failure, it is sufficient to say that counselors may fail in exactly the same ways that their counselees have failed. Consequently, it is important for counselors to examine their own lives and their counseling practices in the light of every failure they detect in others. Counselees become strong reminders of human error and sin and, in that sense, are among the counselor's most valuable teachers.