Quotes About Self-awareness

Like most people, Hamilton and Adams were preternaturally sensitive to flaws in the other that they themselves possessed.

Are you going to let this money puff you up? Keep your eyes open. Don't lose your balance.

Had Rockefeller not feared his own capacity for excess, he wouldn't have engaged in such strenuous introspection.

These intimate conversations with myself, I'm sure, had a great influence on my life. I was afraid I could not stand my prosperity, and tried to teach myself not to get puffed up with any foolish notions.

Yet he was more vulnerable to criticism than he admitted.

A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness.

self-referential semantic labyrinth.

Now I know that without mirrors we are different, we're not really the same...Maybe they had noticed us looking worriedly at other people's faces, as if we wee trying to see in them what we had become

The thing is, you make choices. You do some things and you don't do others and in the end there's not much point in asking what different choices might have gained you, and lost you, unless you have a time machine. You become those choices, you embody them... I'd known I couldn't stay, just as I'd known years before I couldn't be with him, even as I'd gone on pretending I had a choice. I was who I was, and I wanted what I already had.

Why was it so hard to tell the difference between what you thought you wanted and what you wanted? Why did people have to be such a danger to themselves?

He looked at them and wondered if they were the fools, or if he was.

I already know I'm smarter than an armadillo.

Perhaps he would glance down and see that he was doing 76 miles an hour, and he would see that 76 squared was 5,776, which ended in 76, where it started, which made 76 an automorphic number, one of only two below 100, the other being 25, whose square was 625, whose square was 390,625, which

identified, and

one of his mother's favorite expressions started to echo in his head: When you're in a hole, stop digging.

On some deep level, we may choose to fill our days with busy work as a way to avoid the inevitable pain and disappointment in accepting that who we are may not be who we thought we were.

They were learning how to perform their privacy.

In the end, despite all your careful introspecting, you pay for following your instincts. And the more intensely and honestly you live, the more incessantly you pay. If you have become that particular, irreducible person, you get precisely what you want but no more. This is the unforgiving truth.

You know what you're getting here, I said. I'm still fairly far reduced. I may never be unabridged again. None of us are unabridged, as you are well aware.

The human brain, instinctively, and unfailingly translates everything into terms of How does that affect ME? Start every appropriate sentence with you.

I wanted to be good but I wasn't sure if I was prepared

The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.

At times it was impossible for him to control the praise and predictions that issued from him like thanks, and he was aware of exaggerating; yet he felt a boxer needed someone who believed in him, and if it were true that confidence could win fights, then he could not be sure his overestimates were really that at all. Guiding

Research suggests that when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.