Quotes About Self-examination

When we've self-examined and shared expectations with someone and we feel they've let us down, it's important to keep the lines of communication open, circle back, and talk about our feelings and move to accountability. "I let you know how important this was to me…

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior. Suddenly I discover that I am ministering to AIDS victims to enhance my resume. I find I renounced ice cream for Lent to lose five excess pounds... I have fallen victim to what T.S. Eliot calls the greatest sin: to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

Rationalization begins with a look in the mirror.

Preoccupation with self is always a major component of unhealthy guilt and recrimination.

For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they're around mirrors.

I watch what I'm doing to see what I believe.

Holding the cup of life means looking critically at what we are living. This requires great courage, because when we start looking, we might be terrified by what we see. Questions may arise that we don't know how to answer. Doubts may come up about things we thought we were sure about. Fear may emerge from unexpected places.

Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

I only know myself as a human entity, the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections, and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

She saw herself in this connexion without detachment – saw others alone with intensity; otherwise she might have been struck, fairly have been amused, by her free assignment of the pachydermatous quality. If

He knew soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid, and that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly be more so.

Bedizened in this unnatural garb Rosalind stood before the mirror, plunging a long look into its depths and reading heaven knows what audacious visions.

But how have I failed so wretchedly, he asked, in all the purpose of my life? What could I have done better? What is it that counts here?

Hypocrites in the Church? Yes, and in the lodge and at the home. Don't hunt through the Church for a hypocrite. Go home and look in the mirror. Hypocrites? Yes. See that you make the number one less.

I think everybody identified at a pretty young age that I was fairly entranced with myself. And that I had to be tempered.

Don't call anyone a devil, because within you, you can experience hell and the devil, and the devil is nothing, but you!

What would I look like if everything that I am, no secrets, was put on paper? Would I be horrifying?

In life there are heads and there are tails however when one starts to excrete thoughts out of the latter and proceed to relieve yourself out of the former then you've become too full of yourself.

You should look inside of yourself and see the person who is there