Quotes About Self-awareness

But the more I focused on my interests, the more it brought out things I liked about myself

Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

I am an invisible man…. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Frustration is the beginning of the end of pretending.

You will please him more readily if you live within the limits proper to you, and do not set your sights at things beyond you (Sir. 3:22).

What a mystery the human person is. Sometimes horrible effects of our choices come that we in no way intend. Sometimes the difference between what we think we are doing and what we are actually doing is total. But it is the inner intention that then characterizes what we do or do not do.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle

The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself…. The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.

We must be our own before we can be another's.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty.

Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine

We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves.