Quotes About Self-examination

For the best conversations are with yourself. At least there's no risk of a misunderstanding.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

This is how humans are: we question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.

This challenge means that each of us as apologists must examine our own hearts. Have we loved enough to listen, or is it that we love to hear the sound of our own answers? Are we really arguing for Christ, or are we expressing our need always to be right?

Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians," W. H. Auden said in a sermon, "will do well to be extremely reticent on the subject. Indeed it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn't one, either in faith or morals.

At least once a week examine yourself before God to see if your life is measuring up to the standard He has for you.

Beware of anything that would tarnish God's mirror in you. It is always something good stains it—good, but not best.

The first thing I must be willing to admit when I begin to examine what controls and dominates me is that I am the one responsible for having yielded myself to whatever it may be. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because somewhere in the past I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because at some point in my life I yielded myself to Him.

My misgivings arise from the fact that I search within to find how He will do what He says. My doubts spring from the depths of my own inferiority.

Do you have even the slightest reliance on anything or anyone other than God? Is there a remnant of reliance left on any natural quality within you, or on any particular set of circumstances? Are you relying on yourself in any manner whatsoever regarding this new proposal or plan which God has placed before you? Will you examine yourself by asking these probing questions?

The real test of spiritual focus is being able to bring your thoughts and imagination under control. Is your mind focused on the face of an idol? Is the idol yourself? Is it your work?

And I will suffer great humiliation once I come to acknowledge and understand that I have not really been concerned about realizing Jesus Christ Himself, but only concerned with knowing what He has done for me.

One good way to inventory ourselves is to ask ourselves questions about specific character traits. Then we examine in writing the ways that we've exhibited these characteristics in our lives. For instance, we might ask ourselves if we have been prideful. Have arrogance and false pride characterized our behavior? If so, we list them in our inventory. Then, we illustrate the characteristic of pride by listing examples of how pride has caused us to act.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. Ralph Waldo Emerson

teacher within is not the voice of conscience but of identity and integrity. It speaks not of what ought to be but of what is real for us, of what is true. It says things like, "This is what fits you and this is what doesn't"; "This is who you are and this is who you are not"; "This is what gives you life and this is what kills your spirit—or makes you wish you were dead.

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.

First, ask yourself why you feel that way. What is the exact moment and action that caused the feeling? Is it something big, or small and isolated?

I was only playing for myself, but I was a harsh audience.

Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself.

He figured out what he wanted to see by seeing himself." (About Robert Mapplethorpe)

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.

The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear.

The minute you hear a sermon on materialism, you're glad somebody else is there to hear it.

Here's how gospel growth works: you cannot grieve what you do not see, you cannot confess what you haven't grieved, and you can't repent of what you haven't confessed.