Quotes About Self-examination

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you.

But unless you're looking at actual lived experience, the more profound meanings will remain forever shrouded. You'll never unearth the more complex truths, the ones that counter that convenient first take on the past. A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or to pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He's missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life.

Have I lived enough? Have I loved enough? Have I considered Right Action enough, have I come to any conclusion? Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude? Have I endured loneliness with grace? - A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver

It is the internal force - this intimate interrupter - whose tracks I would follow. the world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self - and does - is a darker and more curious matter.

misfortune had tainted my mind and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.

A veces deseaba desterrar de mí todo pensamiento, todo afecto;

Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

since I myself find in myself no pity to myself.

Search your own heart with all diligence for out of it flow the issues of life.

This brings into focus one of the basic flaws of the Personality Ethic. To try to change outward attitudes and behaviors does very little good in the long run if we fail to examine the basic paradigms from which those attitudes and behaviors flow. This perception demonstration also shows how powerfully our paradigms affect the way we interact with other people.

SO, WHAT DO YOU WANT to be when you grow up? That question may appear a little trite at first, but just think about it for a moment. Are you— right now—who you want to be, what you dreamed you'd be, doing what you always wanted to do? Now, be honest. Well, are you?

Can you look at yourself almost as though you were someone else?

Don't worry about figuring out anything. It is not necessary to figure anything out, or to theorize, or even look out there. You need only to look at your assumptions, your unexamined beliefs.

was] a stranger to himself.

The practice mirror is to be used for the correction of faults, not for a love affair, and the figure you watch should not become your dearest friend.

I'm troubled by the notion that while I wasn't looking, I seem to have become an asshole.

Perhaps that is true prayer: the question, "What have I done wrong, and what can I do now to set things at least a little bit more right?

Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values. If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it's time to examine your values. It's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It's time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.

Then he asked himself the most difficult of questions: had he personally contributed to the catastrophe of his life? If so, how?

El narciso que se empereza en la contemplación de su propia belleza, o de su propia importancia, o de su propia desdicha, y morosamente la paladea con ayuda de un analista, descansa confortablemente en el diván de su tristeza.

Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia.

Sabes lo que es quedarse a la orilla de uno mismo, contemplándose?

Call yourself a leader? he asked himself savagely.