Quotes About Self-awareness

He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you. Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

Modern man needs to be considered as more than a psycho-physical reality. His spiritual existence cannot be neglected. He is not a mere organism. He is a person.

Man exists authentically only when he is not driven, but, rather, responsible.

This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!

Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!...imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended.

What matters is not the features of our character or the drives and instincts per se, but rather the stand we take toward them. And the capacity to take such a stand is what makes us human beings.

Zwischen Reiz und Reaktion liegt ein Raum. In diesem Raum liegt unsere Macht zur Wahl unserer Reaktionen. In unserer Reaktion liegen unsere Entwicklung und unsere Freiheit.

I too am a poet who has found some favour with the Muse. I too have written songs. I too have heard the shepherds call me bard. But I take it from them with a grain of salt: I have the feeling that I cannot yet compare with Varius or Cinna, but cackle like a goose among melodious swans.

You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character.

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

What if I told you I'm incapable of tolerating my own heart?

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people...Think of things in themselves.

The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.

We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know

If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.

I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge.

Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.