Quotes About Self-examination

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

And he felt dubious and discontented suddenly, and wondered whether he was really and truly successful as a human being.

She was no longer examining life, but being examined by it; she had become a real person.

A man does not talk to himself quite truly — not even to himself: the happiness or misery that he secretly feels proceeds from causes that he cannot quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the explicable they lose their native quality.

For Baldwin, even in his later work, the category of race all too often pulls us out of the places where the hard work of self-examination happens. It can easily become an illusion of safety, because so many questions are settled beforehand by the assumptions and stereotypes that come with our understanding of race.

To live and move about the world without questioning how the world has shaped and is shaping you is, in a way, to betray the gift of life itself, Baldwin argued.

I have to live with myself and so, I want to be fit for myself to know.

I want to be able, as days go by, always to look myself straight in the eye.

I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.

Su hábito de mirarse en los espejos no tiene nada que ver ni con quererse ni con gustarse. Siempre ha sido ni más ni menos que otro intento de aprender a saber quién carajos es él mismo

Cleanse thou me from secret faults.

And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I?

That's me in the cornerThat's me in the spotlightLosing my religion

Tis the hardest thing in the world to be a good Thinker, without being a strong Self-Examiner.

On the one hand, they're monstrous egotists. Self-confidence, self-examination, self-hatred even … but it's all about self. All those hours on their own! And yet at the same time, they're genuinely altruistic. All they want to do is please other people. I've often thought it must demand a sort of deficiency to be a writer.

What exactly was the point? And more pertinently, what the hell was I doing here? How had I allowed my life to come to this?

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

I'm not a psychiatrist.

I'm not in the habit of going to a psychologist. I psychologize myself.

Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth.

We must first be able to look honestly at fundamentalism in our own backyard, if we are to have any hope of weeding it out.

How does thee like thyself?

How does tha' like thysel'?" she inquired, really quite as if she were curious to know.

And what good has all your reading done you? Out of all the things you have read, how much has really stayed in your soul, what roots have grown there that will, in a good time, bring forth fruit? Examine your heart carefully. If you compare the whole of what you know with what you don't know, you will find that your knowledge is like a small stream dried up in the summer heat compared to the ocean of your ignorance. And even granted that you do know a lot, what difference does it make?