Quotes About Self-awareness

Because anyone that can make you feel that bad about yourself is toxic, you know?" "He doesn't make me feel bad about myself," I said, knowing even as my lips formed the words this was exactly what he did. Or what I let him do. It was hard to say. "What you need," Kristy said, "what you deserve, is a guy who adores you for what you are. Who doesn't see you as a project, but a prize. You know?

My mother had always been the point that I calibrated myself against. In knowing where she was, I could always locate myself, as well.

But I knew what it said. That I could be imperfect, but only so much. Human, but only within limits. And honest, to her or to myself, never.

Ordinarily, I am the person who falls in love quickly and somewhat inappropriately and then goes on to destroy what is a good thing. That's always been my style. So, you know: I get it. And I feel right now the way I imagine all those guys felt with me. And I have to say, for the first time in my life, I feel something approaching compassion for them.

We both know how to hide our sharpest parts, I just don't always recognize my own weaponry.

You told me once that I was just the first draft, and I'm inclined to believe you, but you came with a lot more pieces to assemble and Mom and Dad never got the manual.

Then. I used to practice what I would look like when someone was falling in love with me.

Depression is hard to describe not just because it is complex and abstract but also because it occupies the part of us capable of describing things.

Jack] checked his watch, then returned to studying her back. damn if she didn't have a nice back, too - smooth, unblemished skin, nicely shaped vertebrae- He pulled himself up short. Nicely shaped vertebrae? Was he going insane?

Sometimes, even when you know someone is a hundred different kinds of wrong for you, you get sucked into old patterns and behaviors.

In the reflection I see my shoulder-length curly brown hair. My lime-green pajamas. My striped slippers.

Shame is an odd emotion. It clings to things over which we have no control, like a scent.

Straight people are the most pathetic of all. I've never seen such a miserable group of people in my life. They don't know anything about themselves

I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

it was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.

Whatever lessens suffering in yourself and others, that is right. Whatever increases suffering, that is wrong. The answer is within you. When you are free of pride and prejudice, when you are calm and attentive, a light will shine within you. Through meditation and through being mindful you will find your own knowledge of rightness. You will be your own light.

The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.

To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.

Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody's business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them.

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom--which is bordered on all sides by isolation--is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.

A person can become tired of looking himself over and trying to fix himself up. You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half

My God! Who is this creature? It considers itself human.

Even worse is the discovery that one has been living out certain greeting-card sentiments, with ribbons of middle-class virtue tied in a bow around one's heart.

You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?