Quotes About Self-awareness

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

It's rare that I hear the author blame the real culprit: themselves. It's hard to admit but it's the first step toward selling more books and understanding who bears the true responsibility for selling books—the author.

The ability to focus the mind is the ability to not let it run away with you. It does not mean not to think—but to be the one who directs your own thinking.

Fighting the mind does not work. What works best is learning to focus it.

In a society that has become so oriented toward language as a way of representing truth, it is very possible to lose touch with your ability to feel and with it your ability to "remember" the shots themselves.

the key to better tennis—or better anything—lies in improving the relationship between the conscious teller, Self 1, and the natural capabilities of Self 2.

Go on, live in your poultry-yard. Scratch straw and cluck and cackle at everything that you take for a fox. [Exit.

Whoever suffers from the malady of being unable to endure any injustice, must never look out of the window, but stay in his room with the door shut. He would also do well, perhaps, to throw away his mirror.

All we are not stares back at what we are.

I am sure it is everyone's experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think

The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.

For the others, like me, there is only the flash Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass To meet one's madness

Every man carries within him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow. A parlor game for a wet afternoon – imaging the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever one looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

The great vice of our age […] is that we are all not only 'actors' but know that we are ('reduplicated Hamlets'), and that it is only at moments, in spite of ourselves, and when we least expect it, that our real feelings break through.

Look into my eyes, and you will see me there--all, all that is in my heart.' 'Oh, I know what I should see there!'...'What would you see? Tell me?' 'There is a little black ball in the middle of your eye; I should see myself in it no bigger than that,' and she marked off about an eighth of her little finger-nail. 'There is a pool in the wood, and I look down and see myself there. That is better. Just as large as I am--not small and black like a small, small fly.

The work is to somehow talk ourselves beyond / the sleepiness of selfhood

I have no way of telling what I miss I am the only one who misses it

The Hydra calls me but I am used to it It calls me Everybody But I know my name and do not answer

Let all lights but yours be nothing to me. Let the memory of tongues not unnerve me so that I stumble or quake. But lead me at times beside the still waters; There when I crouch to drink let me catch a glimpse of your image Before it is obscured with my own…

It's really something for people who are approaching 30 to take a look at what that means to them. I think turning 30 is a chance to re-identify with yourself.

I wanted to give my first instincts a chance without shooting them down immediately, which I sometimes do.

I wasn't thinking of being the greatest. But I knew I had a chance.

If you can figure out how you're feeling, then maybe you have a chance of getting over it.