Quotes About Self-awareness

The subtlest of all differences between human beings has to to with their attitude to themselves when they are thinking about themselves. Some caress themselves when they are alone and consciously dote on themselves, whereas others hold themselves apart from themselves with a certain despotic contempt for themselves—and this, too, even in the midst of their liveliest sensations.

Molly Bea, she of the hard white breasts lightly dusted with golden freckles, would never be so humiliated by life because she could never become as deeply involved in the meaty toughness of life. She would never be victimized by her own illusions because they were not essential to her. She could always find new ones when the old ones wore out. But Cathy was stuck with hers. The illusion of love, magically changed to a memory of shame.

She was back in three minutes just to tell me that she couldn't guarantee she wouldn't get a little nutty from time to time, but she felt she was past the pill period, and then she headed back toward the beach, a lissome broad in her mirrored sunglasses, walking on good legs, and she was far younger than her years, yet old as the sea she approached.

The three unholy McGees—the one I try not to be, and the one I wish I was, and the one I really am.

answer?" I shrugged. "Answer shmanser. In the immortal words of Popeye, I yam what I yam. I know my patterns and limitations, needs and hang-ups. So I go on. Right? I endure. I enjoy what I can. There aren't any more forks in the road to take. Keep walking.

I live free and simple, Kirby, and I look on myself in the mirror and say hello to a friend I like. The day I stop liking her, I change my ways.

You design the vulgar pots and sell them to the vulgar people. When you start believing them, you become fraudulent, Miss Nina. You make a plausible adjustment to the facts of life. I don't. And that isn't a virtue on my part. It's the disease of permanent adolescence. Honey, when you take your tongue out of your cheek, you become suspect.

I had a horror of the danger of arrogance. What a pitiful thing it is when a man lets a little temporary success spoil him, warp his judgment, and he forgets what he is!

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so.

I'm beginning to learn a few of the things I dont want," said Herf quietly. "At least I'm beginning to have the nerve to admit to myself how much I dislike all the things I dont want.

For after years of living in a cage, a lion no longer even believes it is a lion . . . and a man no longer believes he is a man.

We are not inviting—we are guarded. Most of our energy is spent trying to hide our true selves, and control our worlds to have some sense of security.

We are hiding, every last one of us. Well aware that we, too, are not what we were meant to be, desperately afraid of exposure, terrified of being seen for what we are and are not, we have run off into the bushes. We hide in our office, at the gym, behind the newspaper and mostly behind our personality. Most of what you encounter when you meet a man is a facade, an elaborate fig leaf, a brilliant disguise.

There are two kinds of people in this world; the clueless and the repentant, those who are open to looking at their life, and those who are not, both that know they need God to change them, and those that expect EVERYONE else to change.

This is why the apply some principles approach to marriage improvement doesn't work. So long as we choose to turn a blind eye to how we are fallen as men or women, and to the unique style of relating that we have forged out of our sin and brokenness, we will continue to do damage to our marriages.

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.

Let people feel the weight of who you are, and let them deal with it.

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.

I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

There are three types of intelligent persons: the first so intelligent that being called very intelligent must seem natural and obvious; the second sufficiently intelligent to see that he is being flattered, not described; the third so little intelligent that he will believe anything. I knew I belonged to the second kind.

If you are wise, you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

You accept that you are English. You don't pretend that you'd rather be French or Italian or something else.

The ancient Greeks could laugh at themselves. The Romans could not. That is why France is a civilized society and Spain is not.