Quotes About Self-awareness

I am losing my great, dissolving, disintegrating pity for others, in which I saw deflected the compassion I wanted for myself. I no longer give compassion, which means I no longer need to receive it.

you are a narcissist. That is the raison dêtre of the journal. Journal writing is a disease. But it's all right. It's very interesting. I don't know of any journal more interesting. I don't know of any woman writing so frankly.

We don't see things how they are, we see things the way we are.

Anaïs Nin noted in her diary: "The same thing which makes Henry indestructible is what makes me indestructible: It is that at the core of us is a writer, not a human being.

Whereas by desiring someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feel: how alive I am! I am capable of desire.

Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.

Confront all the angry thoughts, feelings, the jealousies and condemnations, to find their cause, seek the root of such feelings and then operate on that. Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts.

Patients weep when they discover they are their own victimizers and not the victim of others. They weep when they discover they are responsible for their own suffering.

We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.

I was shy, withdrawn, and read obsessionally. But I never wanted to be anyone else other than me.

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task.

I know my defects. I don't need you to take that stand-offish and unsympathetic tone. I get enough of that from the men who can't bully me into loving them, or obeying them

Are you sad? Do you want me to leave? - I'm not sad, but I'm blocked. My whole past seems to stop me. I can't let go. I feel as if I can inhale but not exhale. I'm just constrained, unnatural.

Psychoanalysis

I have a mind which is bigger than all the rest of me, an inexorable conscience.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.

When I look at the large green iron gate from my window it takes on the air of a prison gate. An unjust feeling, since I know I can leave the place whenever I want to, and since I know that human beings place upon an object, or a person, this responsibility of being the obstacle when the obstacle lies always within one's self.

For what always creates anxiety in me is the doubt of my own sanity. I always question myself: am I being over-sensitive, am I exaggerating?

J'ai été bon quelquefois. Je ne m'en félicite pas. J'ai été mé- chant souvent; je ne m'en repens pas," writes Gauguin.

Noi non vediamo le cose come sono; le vediamo come siamo noi.

But perhaps Rank is right and humility is an atonement for your great inner pride and knowingness about your self!

And I grew in depth through sadness and self-doubt.

And. the page on the "I" and "he"—the double motif—is really superbly done. "Have I invented him? Am I talking? Am I what he is saying?" And when he tells you to shut up because you are deforming your own thought. Very beautiful.