Quotes About Self-awareness

I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.

But truthfully? Let me tell you what I honestly think. I think, maybe he hasn't even noticed that I'm gone. But. I have.

I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language.

I don't mind a bit being labelled a suicide.

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere,' remarked Elias Canetti, suggesting how effortlessly and yet how uselessly we can find fault with others.

Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.

A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It

We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn't a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven't allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly and that we are invested enough to care.

Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.

Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things.

It seemed an advantage to be travelling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with, we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

What matters is not what we seem to a random group, but what we know we are. In Schopenhauer's words: 'Every reproach can hurt only to the extent that it hits the mark. Whoever actually knows that he does not deserve a reproach can and will confidently treat it with contempt.

A fundamental truth, is that there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing. People are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don't dare or know how to communicate them to others. 

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. 'Thank God!' we say,' those illusions are gone.' Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.

So, in what ways are you mad?