Quotes About Self-awareness

Happiness is not out here. It is in there.

Don't worry about being angry. Worry when being angry becomes impossible. Because then you have been consumed.

To say how I was feeling would lead to feeling more of what I was feeling.

When it comes to our minds, awareness is very often the solution itself.

Do you ever think 'how did I end up here?' Like you are in a maze and totally lost and it's all your fault because you were the one who made every turn?

It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

We are all potential depressives, but that is never going to be all we are.

the key to happiness – or that even more desired thing, calmness – lies not in always thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don't become them.

Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself. I am trying.

Check your emotional armour is actually protecting you, and not so heavy you can't move.

One thing mental illness taught me is that progress is a matter of acceptance. Only by accepting a situation can you change it. You have to learn not to be shocked by the shock. Not to be in a state of panic about the panic. To change what you can change and not get frustrated by what you can't.

She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano, she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.

I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn't going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else's life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watch each letter disappear.

I suppose, in the absence of universal certainties, we are our own best laboratory.

To believe in the things we feel at that point is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.

It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but—if that is the metaphor—you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.

You are right to think of these lives like a piano where you're playing tunes that aren't really you. You are forgetting who you are. In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one. You are forgetting your root life. You are forgetting what worked for you and what didn't. You are forgetting your regrets.

She had a fire insider her. She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her. The she realised. A fire has no motive. Only she could have that. The power was hers.

In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself.

Time disproves the lies depression tells.

I was better. I was better. But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realized I wasn't perfectly well was the moment I realized I was still very ill indeed.

She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.

I've let people down. I haven't always been easy. I've done things I regret. I was a bad wife. Not always a good mother, either. People have given up a little on me, and I don't entirely blame them.

Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but - if that is the metaphor - you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.