Quotes About Self-awareness

Daily Law: Look for signs of your own aggressive impulses in past actions—how they led to friction or success.

The reason for this is twofold: first, we are quick to discern the mistakes and defects of others, but when it comes to ourselves we are generally too emotional and insecure to look squarely at our own. Second, people rarely tell us the truth about what it is that we do wrong.

Fortunately, to acquire rationality is not complicated. It simply requires knowing and working through a three-step process. First, we must become aware of what we shall call low-grade irrationality. This is a function of the continual moods and feelings that we experience in life, below the level of consciousness. When we plan or make decisions, we are not aware of how deeply these moods and feelings skew the thinking process.

Stop Being So Nice Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. —Carl Jung

You] will tend to deny that you ever experience any envy, at least strong enough to act on. you are simply not being honest with yourself.

Los errores suelen perdo- narse, pero el desprecio nunca. Nues- tro orgullo lo recuerda para siem- pre. (Lord Chesterfield, 1694-1773)

This should not upset you but liberate you. The book will teach you to stop taking personally their insinuating comments, shows of coldness, or moments of irritation. The more you grasp this, the easier it will be to react not with your emotions but rather with the desire to understand where their behavior might come from.

To think that by doing more you are doing better is a common blunder. It is never good to seem to be trying too hard—it is as if you were covering up some deficiency.

Daily Law: Examine the faults you see in others and how they are in you as well.

The weakness stems from our natural tendency to overestimate our skills. We normally have a self-opinion that is somewhat elevated in relation to reality.

Having such clarity about ourselves and others could change the course of our lives in so many ways, but first we must clear up a common misconception: we tend to think of our behavior as largely conscious and willed.

Trying to deny our self-absorbed nature, trying to pretend we are somehow more altruistic than others, make it impossible for us to transform ourselves.

Daily Law: Be brutally honest with yourself, aware of how your need to fit in can shape and warp your thinking. Does that anxiety or sense of outrage that we feel come completely from within, or is it inspired by the group?

The Laws of Human Nature, 14: Resist the Downward Pull of the Group—The Law of Conformity

In some people the rider is too strong, holds the reins too tightly, and is afraid to occasionally let the animal go into a gallop.

Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity—precisely the time when you need strength.

We all have limitations—our energies and skills will take us only so far. Danger comes from trying to surpass our limits.

The Laws of Human Nature is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes. If you let it guide you, it will radically alter how you perceive people and your entire approach to dealing with them. It will also radically change how you see yourself.

You will also become humbler, realizing you're not superior to others in the way you had imagined. This will not make you feel guilty or weighed down by your self-awareness, but quite the opposite. You will accept yourself as a complete individual, embracing both the good and the bad, dropping your falsified self-image as a saint. You will feel relieved of your hypocrisies and free to be more yourself. People will be drawn to this quality in you.

The shadow is something we deny and repress. It is so much easier to dig up and moralize about the dark qualities of others. It is almost unnatural for us to look inward at this side of ourselves. But remember you are only half a human if you keep this buried. Be intrepid in this process.

Con demasiada frecuencia creemos que el poder cambia a la gente, cuando en realidad la muestra tal como es.

false path in life is generally something we are attracted to for the wrong reasons—money, fame, attention, and so on. If it is attention we need, we often experience a kind of emptiness inside that we are hoping to fill with the false love of public approval. Because the field we choose does not correspond with our deepest inclinations, we rarely find the fulfillment that we crave.

If people were rational and morally superior, the world would be suffused with goodness and peace. We know, however, the reality, and so some people, perhaps all of us, are merely deceiving ourselves.

If you cannot help being charming and superior, you must learn to avoid such monsters of vanity. Either that, or find a way to mute your good qualities when in the company of a Cesare Borgia.