Quotes About Self-awareness

Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.

Become conscious of being conscious.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but you thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.

Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge.

Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.

The human condition: lost in thought.

On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. All the things that truly matter — beaut...y, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind...

Fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world cannot give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self created suffering comes to an end.

Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.

But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.

One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

Let go of excessive thinking and see how everything changes. Your relationships change because you don't demand that the other person should do something for you to enhance your sense of self. You don't compare yourself to others or try to be more than someone else to strengthen your sense of identity.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours," not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

I don't know is not confusion. Confusion is I don't know, but I should know or I don't know, but I need to know. When you fully accept that you don't know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.

As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain. Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious.

So next time somebody says, "Sorry to have kept you waiting," you can reply, "That's all right, I wasn't waiting. I was just standing here enjoying myself — in joy in my self.

As long as we define ourselves in terms of our pains and problems, we will never be free from them.

If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, you are probably creating suffering for others too. These unconscious mind patterns tend to come to an end simply by making them conscious, by becoming aware of them as they happen. You cannot be conscious and create suffering for yourself.

Jesus' words, "Forgive them for they do not know what they do," also apply to yourself." ? Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks