Quotes About Self-examination

I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.

I better be humble. I'm always checking myself.

Desi me examina.

You have to admit you're a jerk and that everything was all your fault." "So, like, what men are supposed to do in general," I said.

How hungrily we read about ourselves!

It's the endlessly thinking about yourself that causes such heart shame.

The only reason I don't like playing in the World Series is I can't watch myself play.

Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.

The Miguel Syjuco character is not me. I wanted him to represent my own fears and frustrations and guilt, my own worst tendencies and my optimistic expectations. He's a cautionary tale for me. But he's also an examination of the darkest things that haunt me as a person.

One of my worst fears is being a self-indulgent person.

Europe's leaders need to sit down with Socrates for a night; a life unexamined is not worth living. We have to remember that, as he says, the pursuit of wealth should never be at the expense of wisdom.

If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.

My generation spends too much time in the mirror and not enough looking inside ourselves.

When you can stand apart from your own mind and examine it—to think about your thoughts, feelings, and moods—you then have the basis for using imagination, conscience, and independent will in entirely new ways. You literally become transcendent. You transcend your background, history, and psychic baggage.

The fuck are you staring at? I hiss at the stranger staring at me in my rearview. Oh, wait, that's me.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves if we are underlings.

Sin, too, is real. All we have to do is look at the news or, if our vision is good enough, look in the mirror.

I did no such thing as sit there with my mouth open, though I may as well have, since I felt as if my mind was gaping. It had simply never occurred to me to wonder what kind of person I was, what kind of person I wanted to be. I had not envisioned this as something I had any control over, just as I could not alter the round shape of my face or the dense black curl of my hair.

I've been burdened by questions I've asked myself a thousand times since the last time we were together. Why did I do it? And would I do it again? It was I, you see, who ended it.

Take care lest you play the hypocrite by spending all your time trying to get others right before you worship God yourself.

Examine everything that you've been taught, not simply what you've been taught in school, but the images that have been held up to you since the time of your birth.

There are certain things that make me relax, like writing my journal. That's the only time that I'm relaxing. It's the only time I really get to examine myself.

I have a tough time judging myself.

I'm no good for anything except taking the world apart and putting it together again (and I manage the latter less and less frequently).