Quotes About Self-awareness

research on happiness shows that those who live under a self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.

In the famous tale by Ahiqar, later picked up by Aesop (then again by La Fontaine), the dog boasts to the wolf all the contraptions of comfort and luxury he has, almost prompting the wolf to enlist. Until the wolf asks the dog about his collar and is terrified when he understands its use. "Of all your meals, I want nothing." He ran away and is still running.*3 The question is: what would you like to be, a dog or a wolf?

This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.fn3

you need to know whether you do not like the pursuit of money and wealth because you genuinely do not like it, or because you are rationalizing your inability to be successful at it with the argument that wealth is not a good thing because it is bad for one's digestive system or disturbing for one's sleep or other such arguments.

So we are a little better than animals, after all—but perhaps not by much.

was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.

to accept the fact that I am rather emotional.

Though I keep trying to convince her of my internal humility and insecurity concealed under a confident exterior;

It struck me, a belief that has never left me since, that we are just a great machine for looking backward, and that humans are great at self-delusion.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.

We see flaws in others and not in ourselves.

My problem is that I'm not rational.

Whatever you do, just don't be a dog claiming to be a wolf.

I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about - and the reader is no fool. So I use procrastination as a message from my inner self and my deep evolutionary past to resist interventionism in my writing.Yet some psychologists and behavioral economists seem to think that procrastination is a disease to be remedied and cured.

Y entonces, nos sentimos inexplicablemente felices, desmesuradamente felices por ese helado que tomaremos dentro de poco; nos preguntamos: ¿cómo es posible tanta felicidad ante la perspectiva de un helado, en nosotros que somos tan adultos en nuestros vertiginosos pensamientos, que estamos tan extrañamente perdidos en un mundo de sombras?

When she lowers her eyes she seems to hold all the beauty in the world between her eyelids; when she raises them I see only myself in her gaze.

You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one--like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail--making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.

The willingness to experience and accept our feelings carries no implication that emotions are to have the last word on what we do. I may not be in the mood to work today; I can acknowledge my feelings, experience them, accept them—and then go to work. I will work with a clearer mind because I have not begun the day with self-deception.

In the inner courtroom of my mind, mine is the only judgment that counts.

To live consciously means to seek to be aware of everything that bears on our actions, purposes, values, and goals—to the best of our ability, whatever that ability may be—and to behave in accordance with that which we see and know.

For the optimal realization of our possibilities, we need to trust ourselves and we need to admire ourselves, and the trust and admiration need to be grounded in reality, not generated out of fantasy and self-delusion.

One of the most important forms of heroism is the heroism of conciousness, the heroism of thought: the willingness to tolerate aloneness.

I am responsible for my own existence and happiness.

I accept the reality of my problems, but I am not defined by them. My problems are not my essence. My fear, pain, confusion, or mistakes are not my core.