Quotes About Self-awareness

Still, as long as you keep pointing to the specifics, you will miss the full meaning of your pain. You will deceive yourself into believing that if the people, circumstances, and events had been different, your pain would not exist. This might be partly true, but

I reached a healthy place in which I was able to stop projecting my needs on another human being. We both came to understand that each of us is limited in our capacity to be for another what is needed, and learned to forgive each other for not being God.

There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes. Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it. There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

But in Solitude, we can pay attention to our inner self

When you heed only your lion, you will find yourself overextended and exhausted. When you take notice only of your lamb, you will easily become a victim of your need for other people's attention.

When people can cease having to be for us everything, we can accept the fact they may still have a gift for us.

When we look for divine solutions in others, we make others into gods and ourselves into demons. Our hands no longer caress but instead grasp. Our lips no longer kiss or form kind words but bite.

If prayer, understood as an intimate relationship with God, is indeed the basis of all relationships—to ourselves as well as to others.

The great task is to claim yourself for yourself, so that you can contain your needs within the boundaries of your self and hold them in the presence of those you love. True mutuality in love requires people who possess themselves and who can give to each other while holding on to their own identities.

We often are very, very busy, and usually very tired as a result, but we should ask ourselves how much of our reading and talking, visiting and lobbying, lecturing and writing, is more part of an impulsive reaction to the changing demands of our surroundings than an action that was born out of our own center.

He who thinks that he is finished, is finished. How true. Those who think that they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons.

To pray means to stop expecting from God the same small-mindedness which you discover in yourself.

As I read these words, I am keenly aware of how full my inner life is with this kind of talk. In fact, I am seldom without some imaginary encounter in my head in which I explain myself, boast or apologize, proclaim or defend, evoke praise or pity. It seems that I am perpetually involved in long dialogues with absent partners, anticipating their questions and preparing my responses. I am amazed by the emotional energy that goes into these inner ruminations and murmurings.

Everyone must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

We are constantly invited to be what we are.

Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.

If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

Direct your eye inward, and you'll find / A thousand regions in your mind / Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be / Expert in home-cosmography

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

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

What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.