Quotes About Self-awareness

O que torna os maus poetas ainda piores é o facto de apenas lerem poetas (tal como os maus filósofos apenas lêem filósofos), quando eles tirariam um proveito bem maior de um livro de botânica ou de geologia. Só nos enriquecemos se frequentarmos disciplinas afastadas da nossa. Isto só é verdade, claro está, nos domínios em que grassa o eu.

The stoic's maxim, according to which we should submit uncomplainingly to things which do not depend on ourselves, takes into account only external misfortunes, which escape our will. But how to accommodate ourselves to those which come from ourselves? If we are the source of our ills, whom are we to confront? Ourselves? We manage, luckily, to forget that we are the guilty parties, and moreover existence is tolerable only if we daily renew this lie, this act of oblivion.

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

It was unbearable, and he thought again, 'How unhappy I am!' and became happier.

I can only do what's easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can't, and won't, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who's strong enough to boss me or whom I'm strong enough to boss. So I shan't ever marry, for there aren't such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say 'Jack Robinson.

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

I have always been like the Greeks and didn't know.

She was no longer examining life, but being examined by it; she had become a real person.

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

I am swathed in cant', she thought, 'and it is good for me to be stripped of it.

But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology. He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine. He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul.

A man does not talk to himself quite truly — not even to himself: the happiness or misery that he secretly feels proceeds from causes that he cannot quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the explicable they lose their native quality.

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, 'I am I.

She did not acknowledge that her brain was warped, for the brain itself must assist in that acknowledgement, and she was disordering the very instruments of life.

I have myself to face a world which is tragic without becoming tragic myself.

If they were hypocrites they did not know it, and their hypocrisy had every chance of setting and of becoming true.

There are moments when the inner life actually "pays," when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.  Such moments are still rare in the West; that they come at all promises a fairer future.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness

Viu que Durham [Clive] não só era esperto como tinha também uma mente ordenada e tranquila. Sabia o que queria ler, onde estava mais fraco, e até aquilo em que os professores o podiam ajudar. Não tinha nem a fé cega nos tutores e nas aulas, como Maurice e o seu grupo, nem o desprezo professado por Fetherstonhaugh. -------------------------------------------------- p.42, MAURICE, E.M.FORSTER

Every moment of his life he's forming you, telling you what's charming or amusing or ladylike, telling you what a man thinks womanly; and you, you of all women, listen to his voice instead of to your own.

Women—I heard you say the other day—are never at ease till they tell their faults out loud.

Nothing ever happens to me," She reflected.