Quotes About Self-awareness

Para um escritor, o progresso em direcção ao desprendimento e à libertação é um desastre sem precedentes: ele, mais do que ninguém, precisa dos seus defeitos: se triunfa sobre eles, está perdido. Ele que se abstenha portanto de se tornar melhor, pois, se o conseguir, arrepender-se-à amargamente.

Accountability is not about blame, it's not about being wrong, it is about owning the choices you've made, or are making, that create the results you have in your life. And you do create everything in your life.

What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?

I cursed myself not only for forgetting to turn my phone off but for ever thinking that having a rock music ringtone was cool.

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves.

Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have -- that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it

You who are suffering and read this, turn your attention to the way you think, not to your feelings. Come to terms with your attitude, and your feelings will look after themselves.

To get mad at being called a "little boy" is a proof that you indeed are one

I had some experience in dealing with people who have mental illness and depression, but I didn't see the signs in myself. I couldn't ask for help because I didn't know I needed help.

I am only true when I'm alone.

They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.

She was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her.

First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself 'Who am I?', she would fall flat on her face. For the question 'Who am I?' creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete.

She had no idea how to cope with life and she was only vaguely aware of her own inner emptiness. Were she capable of explaining herself, she might well confide: the world stands outside me. I stand outside myself.

Depersonalization like the deposing of useless individuality— the loss of everything that can be lost, while still being. To take away from yourself little by little, with an effort so attentive that no pain is felt, to take away from yourself like one who gets free of her own skim, her own characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way I am most easily viewed by others and end up being superficially recognizable to myself.

I don't want beauty, I want identity.

It is curious that I can't say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can't say it.

Are we fruit of the same tree? No - Angela is everything I wanted to be and never was. What is she? She's the waves of the sea. While I'm the dense and gloomy forest. I'm in the depths. Angela scatters in sparkling fragments. Angela is my vertigo. Angela is my reverberation.

Would it be simplistic to think the moral problem with regards to others consists in behaving as one ought to, and the moral problem with regards to oneself is managing to feel what one ought to?

Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.

Se não tivesse sido eu, eu não saberia, e tendo sido eu, eu soube.

I was now so much greater that I could no longer see myself. As great as a far-off landscape. I was far off. But perceptible in my furthest mountains and in my remotest rivers: the simultaneous present no longer scared me, and in the furthest extremity of me I could finally smile without even smiling. At last I was stretching beyond my sensibility.

Esa muchacha no sabía que ella era lo que era, tal como un cachorro no sabe que es cachorro. Por eso no se sentía infeliz. Lo único que quería era vivir. No sabía para qué, no se lo preguntaba. Quién sabe, tal vez encontraba que había una ínfima gloria en vivir. Pensaba que una persona está obligada a ser feliz. De modo que lo era.