Quotes About Self-awareness

He thinks he's all aces but he's mostly sevens and eights.

There are times when a man should be content with what he has but never with what he is

Pride always wants a little smarting.

No man must think that the world was made for him.

The scientific literature shows that hunger, anger, loneliness, tiredness, pain, and stress are common "preconditions for poor decision making." So Shubin Stein uses an acronym, HALT-PS, as a reminder to pause when those factors might be impairing his judgment and postpone important decisions until he's in a state in which his brain is more likely to function well.* This is our seventh technique for reducing avoidable stupidity.

wrote: Rule 1: Clone like crazy. Rule 2: Hang out with people who are better than you. Rule 3: Treat life as a game, not as a survival contest or a battle to the death. Rule 4: Be in alignment with who you are; don't do what you don't want to do or what's not right for you. Rule 5: Live by an inner scorecard; don't worry about what others think of you; don't be defined by external validation.

Humble souls are fearful of their own strength.

We see ourselves in a dark room, and we think we are fine and clean; but would we compass ourselves with the beams of God's glorious majesty and holiness, then the sun rays would not discover more atoms in the air, than the holiness of God would convince of sin to be in us. But it is the trick of pride not to come where it may be outshined; it had rather go where it shall be adored, than where it is sure to be put to shame.

Is it thy head is weak—thy judgment I mean? watch thyself, and come not among those that drink no wine but that which thy weak parts cannot bear —seraphic notions and high-flown opinions—and do not think thyself much wronged to be forbidden their cup.

I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.

I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.

The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes.

no one could say, looking at her lined, pale and puffy face, the shapeless garish sack she had double-pinned around her, or the misfocusing eyes and slack wet mouth, that she had led the right life, and she knew it, not even with Freud's fist could she repress that...

Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk, and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy myself when I am well . . . completely - to the edge of both my house and body. No one notices, when they walk by, that I am brimming in the doorways.

I Think, Therefore, You Are

There is an art of which every man should be a master the art of reflection. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?

Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly overvalued by others.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in mind

He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart looks at the busy world through the loop-holes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.

No truly great person ever thought themselves so.

Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.

Persons without education certainly do not want [lack] either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction--they see their objects always near, never in the horizon.

The perceiving our own weaknesses enables us to give others excellent advice, but it does not teach us to to reform ourselves.

No really great man ever thought himself so.