Quotes About Self-awareness

Know thyself. Then know that you are a human being, a member of the species of mankind. So know first and foremost that you do not know, and what you claim to know is almost certainly a means of distracting yourself from what you really know.

People think they are all sort of things they aren't' he had sad. 'They think they are talented when they're not; they think they're powerful when they're actually just bullies; they think they're good when they're bad. People fools themselves all the time, and they don't know that they're fools

Be so good as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that's what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.

Most people define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we had lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.

Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.

We, for our own part, simply call ourselves we. We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

We underestimate our fellow humans because we underestimate ourselves. They - we - are capable of being much more than we seem

Mr. Eagle, you are not a realized man. That is your weakness and also your power. Before one realizes oneself one has the optimism of ignorance. It can be the saving of one's life. Once realized, one faces the terror of knowing what it is you are and have done...the realized man can have a profound effect on the world about him; he must bear the consequences, and guilt, of that as well...

Sometimes he thinks the walls are throbbing, as if the water-stained concrete has developed a tic, and then he allows himself to close his eyelids which are as heavy as iron shields, so that he can tell himself who he is.

Kalbin hatalar?ndan birinin ne büyük ahmakl?k olduÄŸu anla??ld???nda, kendimizi aptal gibi hissederiz ve yak?nlar?m?za, sevdiklerimize bizi neden vakitlice kendimizden kurtarmad?klar?n? sorar?z. Ancak bu, aram?za kimsenin giremeyeceÄŸi bir düÅŸmand?r.

We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.

She had turned away from her sexuality, her instincts having warned her that to do otherwise might be to be absorbed by it; that it was for her, would always be, a big subject, a whole dark continent to map, and she wasn't prepared to go that way, be that explorer, chart those shores: not any more, or, maybe, not yet.

When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left.

How deeply could she have cared for me if she could dive so swiftly into the next things? How real had it been? Such thoughts plagued me, though I knew, in my deepest heart, that this was me trying to shift the blame, and the blame could not be shifted, it rested firmly on my shoulders.—So this was

These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies, until the lies reveal those truths in ways impossible to foretell.

On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one's own advice.

If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process.

Merely accepting that we are lazy, distracted, petty, easily provoked to anger, and inclined to waste our time in ways that we will later regret is not a path to happiness.

It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.

There is now little question that how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.

We are not self-caused little gods.

None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.