Quotes About Self-awareness

You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.

He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is "color-blind," by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to the "you" beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self

We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us. One

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father's children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years...whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face

Once you almost said—to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring—you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as "natural" or "inevitable"—as so many other people seem to do—and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages. Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.

and had a mauvais quart d'heure wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.

A mortifying sense of porousness.

Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble, he said, interrupting me, and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It's possible that it's like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the--what do you call this in English?--skin--film. The thin layer on a bubble.

mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case.

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

She wanted to check that it was not her imagination, that she was not being unfair or undemocratic, or worse still racist (but she had read Colour Blind, a seminal leaflet from the Rainbow Coalition, she had scored well on the self-test), racist in ways that were so deeply ingrained and socially determining that they escaped her attention.

She accepts everything that has happened to her as her destiny, no more surprised or alienated to be who she is than I imagine Cleopatra was to be Cleopatra. I

Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

We will never be perfect: that is our limitation.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as 'natural' or 'inevitable' – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages.

I thought of all the singers and dancers and trumpet players and sculptors and scribblers who had claimed to feel like people, finally here, in Paris, no longer shadows but people in their own right, an effect that possibly required more than twelve hours to take effect, and I wondered how these people were able to tell, so precisely, the moment that they began to feel like a person.

Keista, kaip mes smerkiame kitus, užmirš? vargan? savo b?t?, kol j? netenkame, kai juos iš m?s? atima mirtis. Atima, nes jie niekada mums nepriklaus?...

Pasakyk, kuo didžiuojiesi, ir aš pasakysu, ko tau tr?ksta. Tai kasdienin? m?s? duona.. Neišman?lis dažnai prisistato kaip žinovas, žmogžudys - kaip pagailos vertas žmogus, nusid?jelis - kaip šventeiva, lupikautojas - kaip nusižemin?s žmogus, storžievis - kaip elegantas, o silpnaprotis - kaip intelektualas

Our elders say that an elephant does not find its own trunk heavy.

The world is full of people who remain in relationships that they realize they have no business in. Yet, they stay, hoping and praying for change, believing that the other person will eventually appreciate them and recognize their value.