Quotes About Self-awareness

The public does not like you to mislead or represent yourself to be something you're not. And the other thing that the public really does like is the self-examination to say, you know, I'm not perfect. I'm just like you. They don't ask their public officials to be perfect. They just ask them to be smart, truthful, honest, and show a modicum of good sense.

I defend Not my voice, but my silence

Now mirrors learn not to expect smiles.

I've come to see the resolution, And I must cede the throne And hearken to my own delusion As if it ceased to be my own.

No longer did I want to explain, for I could see myself in the moment, exactly as she was seeing me, as all of them were seeing me.

The total of what you are is so much greater than what you see reflected in mirrors.

Though it is the hardest thing, to work out one's weight and heft in the world, to whittle down all that I am and give it a value.

What chutzpah, to write my life story at forty! Or a bad omen. Perhaps, having written it down, I now feel the life is done. Dora would have made me snap out of it. There are some people just the thought of whom makes us behave better. [Toller]

But I must say it has been, in general, a boon not to have been a beautiful woman. Because I was barely looked at, I was free to do the looking.

it wouldn't take much for the sorrow she felt at the sorrow she caused to drown her again

But you're not as stupid as they say!... Or are you?

Ich bin wie ein Drachen im Wind, wenn jemand die Schnur losläßt, pfff, fliege ich davon. Und du, das ist witzig, ich denke oft, dass du stark genug bist, um mich zu halten, und intelligent genug, um mich ziehen zu lassen.

Mais tu n'es pas aussi abruti qu'on le dit, quand même!.. Si, tu l'es?

During the sleepless hours of the night a thought came to me that seemed important. I got up in the dark and wrote it down. In the morning I read: 'I went looking for loneliness. But it found me.

Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving. from "In That Great River: A Notebook," Poetry . Originally Published: June 1, 2010

I filmed seven movies in 2011 and I think that was a mistake. I pushed myself too hard and I want to be able to come to work each day and give 100 percent. I guess I found out what my boundaries are.

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

She just didn't know who else to be other than the person she was right now,

Loneliness sends you into your body instead of your brain.

For all the robots who question their programming.

and finally his current self-awareness, tinged with compulsions whose origins he couldn't access or control.

I]f you adapted too much in order to deal with them, you ran the risk of forgetting who you were and you could end up being neither and nothing.

you look the truth in the face - not the truth that has fangs and fur but the hard truth about yourself, that you're just as dangerous as the beings the rest of the people fear but you can't afford to be as honest about it. You can't tell those people that you'll make deals with what they fear in order to keep them sage from the monsters who look just like them.

The fact that it took him a decade to realize I was five foot four and plump instead of a five-foot-ten pole dancer with big tits was confusing.