Quotes About Self-awareness

Augustine was right when he said that we love the truth when it enlightens us, but we hate it when it convicts us. Maybe we can't handle the truth. In

One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.

No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either. Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it's a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous.

We all eventually become whatever we pretend to hate.

The deeper reality is that I'm not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I'm certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There's probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

and it occurred to me that people who don't talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they're guarding themselves for some sort of abstract dange, but they're actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they're like.

No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn't have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.

I care about strangers when they're abstractions but feel almost nothing when they are literally in front of me. They seem like unnamed characters in a poorly written novel about myself, which was poorly written by me.

We must start from the premise that—in all likelihood—we are already wrong. And not "wrong" in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves.

I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.

I don't think we have any idea who we are. I think we're engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are.

The mere recognition of an extrinsic reality damages the intrinsic merits of one's own reality. In other words, it's a mistake to (consciously) do what everyone else is doing, just as it's a mistake to (consciously) do the opposite.

And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.

There's simply no way around the limited ceiling of my own mind.

If you don't know what you want, the doorman said, you end up with a lot you don't.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.

My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich.

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love.

Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history's in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

Sometimes your best way to deal with shit is not to hold yourself as such a precious little prize.

By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.

You only ask people about themselves so you can tell them about yourself.