Quotes About Self-awareness

Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples' convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.

Jean Baker Miller pointed out that the so-called need to control and dominate others is psychologically a function, not of a feeling of power, but of a feeling of powerlessness. Distinguishing between power for oneself and power over others, she writes: In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be.

We build too many walls to be honest with ourselves. -Allanon

It was not so much a sense of failure that he had experienced as a sense of his own limitations. You cannot do everything you might wish that you could do.

You spend so much time wondering who you are, don't you think? You flounder about, searching for your identity, when most of the time it is as plain as the nose on your face. You struggle with questions of purpose and need, and forger that the answers are mostly inside yourselves. He paused anew. Cats are not included in that analysis. Cats don't waste time wondering about such things. Cats just get on with the business of living.

We grow as best we can under the circumstances given us. What good does it do to second-guess ourselves years after the fact? Better that we simply try to understand why we are as we are and then better ourselves by learning from that.

What do you care?" Arik Siq asked. "Who your people were matters hardly at all. Who they are now is what matters. Who you are." "Your history is sometimes a way of understanding your present," Pan replied. "You are your history.

Keep talking, and you'll eventually sound like a complete idiot instead of just a half-wit.

Sometimes things feel real when they aren't. It might all just be nonsense you've persuaded yourself is something more.

what he knew to be true about himself he probably saw frequently in others, whether it was there or not.

You are a girl becoming a woman, but you are not there yet. You will get there more quickly and smoothly if you question your choices before acting on them.

We build too many walls to be completely honest with ourselves.

The nearest one could approach to truth was to cultivate a suitably ironic sense of one's own phoniness.

She understood, now, why life had seemed so empty, so pointless: she herself had rendered it so in refusing to think.

Make sure the shadow you chase is not the one you cast.

Sometimes letting out the anger is an even more grievous mistake than holding it in.

Are we our bodies? Is a small person less than a big person, then? If we were our bodies, then when we lost an arm, or a leg, would we be less, would we begin to fade from existence? No. We are the same person. "We are not our bodies; we are our thoughts. As they form, they define who we are, and create the reality of our existence. Between those thoughts, there is nothing, simply the body, waiting for our thoughts to make us who we are.

I'm trying to stop lying to myself about little things. I'm still working on the big ones.

Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can't shut your mind.

His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

Oh yes? Can you identify yourself? -Certainly. I'd know me anywhere.