Quotes About Self-awareness

As you get older, you're humbled by the fact that you're a moron.

I don't want to be a total moron and be just known as the jazz-handed judge.

I never wanted to be the most famous, the most beautiful, the most extravagant.

It's not only the most difficult thing to know one's self, but the most inconvenient.

I was always free because I felt free. It's very important to be free inside. The most important thing is to feel free.

The most important thing is to stay humble because there are always people telling you that you're this and that you're going to do that.

I don't have the feeling of being motivated by anger, revenge or frustration.

I'm probably not motivated by a lot of things that people think I am.

I'm highly critical of myself. There's not something someone else might say that makes me feel I need to be motivated in a different way. I'm a self-motivated guy.

Understanding history means knowing what motivates you.

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.

You can have the most wonderful motives for what you do, but if what you do harms other people, you're fooling yourself.

Among the many preconceptions that cannot be subjected to any empirical test because they are so subjective is the notion that third-party observers know better what is good for people than those people know themselves.

I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then?

The trick was to get his reason and his emotions pulling together in double harness, instead of letting them fly off in opposite directions, tearing him apart between them.

If you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by.

And in that one grey hair I saw my whole life and I said I think I need a hair.

I had learned at last to not project my darkness onto those around me;

But deep prayer, prolonged prayer, is a terrible mirror—kneel there long enough and everything shows. There's no way out of eventually seeing your phoniness and dishonesty.

Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly." —Epictetus

The disillusionment with our own abilities is, perhaps, one of the most important things that can ever happen to us.

I know I am an android, but I feel so ... happy.

You don't know. When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark - I'm on fire almost - I'm burning away into nothing - but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am.