Quotes About Self-awareness

There's some things even Enlightenment won't change. If you're a son-of-a-bitch before you visit the Absolute, you'll still be a son-of-bitch after.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

I've always known that there's more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn't regret that he isn't more fully understood?

Each person's self has become his principal burden; to know oneself has become an end, instead of a means through which one knows the world.

I mean here to propound a paradox, that people can actively enter into their own passivity.

Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands, these shins, these soapy flanks

There's a black dog and there's a white dog, depends on which you feed, depends on which damn dog you live with.

A stone on the path means the tea's not ready, a stone in the hand means somebody's angry, the stone inside you still hasn't hit bottom.

Let's admit, without apology, what we do to each other. We know who our enemies are. We know.

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

This has to be a Rule because there can be no choice here. We have to accept that we are the way we are—the result of everything that has happened. It all just is.

The moral contradictions of our ancestry should not prevent us from reaching a realistic assessment of who we are. Whehn we do that, high hopes are still possible.

They scooped out our insides, Saul. We're not responsible for that. We're not responsible for what happened to us. None of us are. Fred said. But our healing--that's up to us. That's what saved me. Knowing it was my game.

Many's the man/ who thought himself wise/ but what he needed/ he did not know...

He who is unaware of his ignorance will only be misled by his knowledge.

If today people sit and meditate only one or two hours, looking only at their own egos, and call this reflection, how can anything come of it?

He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and "We've got to be together in this thing" when you meant the very opposite ... and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn't know who you were. And how could anyone else be blamed for that?

You see? I don't know what 'mature' means, either, and you could talk all night and I still wouldn't know. It's all just words to me, Frank. I watch you talking and I think: Isn't that amazing? He really does think that way; these words really do mean something to him. Sometimes it seems I've been watching people talk and thinking that all my life. And maybe it means there's something awful the matter with me, but it's true.

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

Yes, me." She made a claw of her hand and clutched at her collarbone. "Me. Me. Me. Oh, you poor, self-deluded—Look at you! Look at you, and tell me how by any stretch"—she tossed her head, and the grin of her teeth glistened white in the moonlight—"by any stretch of the imagination you can call yourself a man!

Emily knew she was going to cry. She tried to avert it with a childhood trick that had sometimes worked before - pressing both thumbnails hard into the tender flesh beneath the nails of her index fingers, so that the self-inflicted pain might be greater than the ache of her swelling throat - but it was no use.

he wanted to discuss his strange compulsion to let people know the worst about himself—this confusion of what was weak and ugly in himself with what was "interesting