Quotes About Self-awareness

Talk About Your Own Mistakes First

I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let's examine the facts.

Instead of waiting for our enemies to criticize us or our work, let's beat them to it. Let's be our own most severe critic. Let's find and remedy all our weaknesses before our enemies get a chance to say a word.

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding that limit.

Adular es decir a la otra persona lo que se piensa de uno mismo".

I discovered years ago that although I couldn't keep people from criticizing me unjustly, I could do something infinitely more important: I could determine whether I would let the unjust condemnation disturb me.

If I knew your thoughts, I would know what you are, for your thoughts make you who you are. By changing our thoughts, we can change our lives.

I got up at sunrise and was happy; I walked, and was happy; I roamed the forests and hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I did nothing, I worked in the garden, I picked the fruit, I helped in the house, and happiness followed me everywhere — happiness which could not be referred to any definite object, but dwelt entirely within myself and which never left me a single instant. — JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU SWISS-BORN ESSAYIST

It is not a bad exercise for a man to sit quiet once in a while and watch the workings of his mind and heart and notice how often he can find himself favoring five or six of the seven deadly sins, and especially the first of those sins, which is named pride. — CARL SANDBURG AMERICAN POET

The hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what is driving it. Our "within" is astonishingly complex and subtle—even devious. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we would do.

But taking love itself—God's kind of love—into the depths of our being through spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first.

Only the humble person will let God be God. Such people are realistic about who they actually are

The truth of the matter is that people are obsessed with themselves. This is often caused by the wounds they have received. When you hit your thumb with a hammer, what happens in the following days? You are very mindful of your thumb. The same is true when we are hurt; we become conscious of ourselves to such an extent that we are imprisoned in that consciousness.

They do not know what they are doing and do not have the ability to distance themselves from it so they can see it for what it is. That is the power of "culture.

And we can't all just get along. Rather, we have to become the kinds of persons who can get along. As a major part of this, our epidermal responses have to be changed in such a way that the fire and the fight doesn't start almost immediately when we are "rubbed the wrong way." Solitude and silence give us a place to begin the necessary changes, though they are not a place to stop.

under their influence, and that of a few less significant developments in psychology, the human being has been increasingly taken to be the kind of thing that could not be a subject of moral knowledge. That is because, in such views, the human self (if it even exists, which has been strongly denied) is governed by unconscious forces other than self-awareness and rational self-direction.

So God uses our self-knowledge or self-awareness, which is heightened and given a special quality by his presence and direction, to search us out and reveal to us the truth about ourselves and our world.

Practice in not speaking can at least give us enough control over what we say that our tongues do not "go off" automatically. This discipline provides us with a certain inner distance that gives us time to consider our words fully and the presence of mind to control what we say and when we say it.

They have long chosen the strategy of selectively resisting their feelings instead of that of not having them—of simply changing or replacing them.

great part of our growth includes disengaging from the expectations of others.

They presume on their justification in being whatever they are—unlike a thought, which by nature is open to challenge and invites the question "Why?

Here's one from me: 'You have to be aware that everyone else is thinking far too hard about themselves to be thinking about you, whoever you are.' If you want it, you can have it. Once you know that, you can be free.

Speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal. So we don't stop, and the faster we go, the harder it becomes to stop.

Buddha had said: Each of us is a God. Each of us knows all. We need only open our minds to hear our own wisdom.