Quotes About Self-awareness

I cured myself of shyness when it finally occurred to me that people didn't think about me half as much as I gave them credit for. The truth was, nobody gave a damn. Like most teenagers, I was far too self-centered. When I stopped being prisoner to what I worried was others' opinions of me, I became more confident and free.

Being different was my cross to bear, but being aware of it was my compensation.

It's not vanity to know your own good points. It would just be stupidity if you didn't; It's only vanity when you get puffed up about them.

Mrs. Cadbury: Tell me what you know about yourself. Anne Shirley: Well, it really isn't worth telling, Mrs. Cadbury... but if you let me tell you what I IMAGINE about myself you'd find it a lot more interesting.

Anne Shirley, you're only pretending to be grown up. I believe when you're alone you're as much a little girl as you ever were.

There's such a lot of different Annes in me. … If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting.

Won't you try to remember you're a lady? she pleaded. Oh, if there were only any hope of being able to forget it

To know God and not oneself to be God, to know blessedness and not oneself to enjoy it, is a state of disunity or unhappiness.

an inner process stands in need of outward criteria

Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time - but how can I be a logician before I'm a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!

If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.

Voi credete di conoscervi se non vi costruite in qualche modo? E ch'io possa conoscervi, se non vi costruisco a modo mio? E voi me, se non mi costruite a modo vostro? Possiamo conoscere soltanto quello a cui riusciamo a dar forma. Ma che conoscenza può essere? È forse questa forma la cosa stessa? Sì, tanto per me, quanto per voi; ma non così per me quanto per voi: tanto vero che io non mi riconosco nella forma che mi date voi, né voi in quella che vi do io.

Era proprio la mia quell'immagine intravista in un lampo? Sono proprio così io, di fuori, quando vivendo - non mi penso? Dunque per gli altri sono quell'estraneo sospeso nello specchio: quello, e non già quale io mi conosco: quell'uno lì che io stesso prima, scorgendolo, non ho riconosciuto. Sono quell'estraneo che non posso veder vivere se non così, in un attimo impensato. Un estraneo che possono vedere e conoscere solamente gli altri, e io no.

Io non potevo vedermi vivere

we are ready enough to note the faults of others, while all the time unconscious of our own.

Ah, yes, ah, yes, my dear friend, think it over well: a minute ago, when this thing happened to you, you were a different person; not only that, you were at the same time a hundred others, a hundred-thousand.

Mi si fissò invece il pensiero ch'io non ero per gli altri quel che finora , dentro di me, m'ero figurato d'essere.

come se parimenti dalle proprie sofferenze vi fosse abilitato. E se gli altri non gli fanno il bene quasi per dovere, egli li accusa, e di tutto il male ch'egli fa quasi per diritto, facilmente si scusa.

I don't know to what author you may be alluding, but believe me I feel what I think; and I seem to be philosophizing only for those who do not think what they feel, because they blind themselves with their own sentiment. I know that for many people this self-blinding seems much more human; but the contrary is really true.

The thought, rather, remained firmly planted, that I was not for others what up to then I had inwardly pictured myself as being.

A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has really a life of his own, marked with his special characteristics; for which reason he is always somebody. But a man—I'm not speaking of you now—may very well be nobody.

haven't you yet perceived that it isn't possible to live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?

But every man knows what unconfessable things pass within the secrecy of his own heart.

I saw then my father for the first time, as I had never seen him before, externalized in his own life, but not as he had been to himself, not as he had felt himself to be, which was something I could never know; but rather, as a being that was wholly strange to me, in that reality which, as I now be held him, I might suppose that others had imposed upon him.