Quotes About Self-awareness

With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.

When I rummage in my own mind I find no noble sentiments about being companions and equals and influencing the world to higher ends. 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.

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.

So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent;

You're infinitely simpler than I am… That's the difficulty.

I like reading my own writing. It seems to fit me closer than it did before.

For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not as simple as our friends would have us to meet our needs. Yet love is simple.

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more then they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.

I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces [...]. 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. [...] 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.

she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and shrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent.

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.

I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, confined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see.

The brain is always thinking, but who is it who is thinking?

Little animal that I am, sucking my flanks in and out with fear, I stand here, palpitating, trembling. But I will not be afraid. I will bring the whip down on my flanks. I am not a whimpering little animal making for the shadow.

I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people.

Virginia Woolf

Habits gradually change the face of one's life as time changes one's physical face; & one does not know it.

They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and then do what other people do when they have done it.

When I say to myself 'Bernard,' who comes?

Si no dices la verdad sobre ti mismo, difícilmente podrás decir la de las otras personas.

Even Orlando (who had no conceit of her person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when their own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass.

Hablo con ellas y descubro que para ser las personas más felices del mundo tan solo necesitan saber que lo son.