Quotes About Self-awareness

Und wirklich, je mehr er sich zu erniedrigen schien, desto mehr schien er erhöht zu werden.

We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.

Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts

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

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.

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

Ich würde nicht so viel über mich reden, wenn ich irgend jemand anderen ebenso gut kennte.

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination

beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.

Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering?

I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation

Don Juan : [...] Les voilà, mes spectres, les spectres de ce que je ne suis pas. Ce sont eux qui me persécutent et m'écoeurent, et qui me survivront. Ils vivront, car il sont le mensonge. Mais si je dois payer ma vie au prix de toutes les sottises et de tous les mensonges qu'on aura dits sur moi, peut-être vaudrait-il mieux n'avoir pas vécu. Je vais changer d'habit et mettre mon beau costume. Il faut être bien vêtu quand on va être arrêté.

People today spend interminable hours telling each other "where they're coming from," and "where they're at," when all that they are doing is inventing implausible little fictions about themselves and their lives. Every new relationship is begun with the dubious exchange of these quirkly little maps.

there is scarce any man, how much soever he may despise the character of a flatterer, but will condescend in the meanest manner to flatter himself

Some people have been noted to be able to read in no book but their own.

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 often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone.

I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.

One never said the things one wanted — one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn't, simply from a sense that one had to say something.

The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all.

Wherever we go we carry this burden of our personal consciousness and wherever we step we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton umbrella to obstruct the prospect and obscure the light of heaven.