Quotes About Self-awareness

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.

I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

There's nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.

Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future

And Casaubon had done a wrong to Dorothea in marrying her. A man was bound to know himself better than that, and if he chose to grow grey crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business to be luring a girl into his companionship. 'It is the most horrible of virgin sacrifices,' said Will; and he painted to himself what were Dorothea's inward sorrows as if he had been writing a choric wail.

I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could produce on others.

Expenditure–like ugliness and errors–becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.

A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these unfavourable reflections of himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.

The majority of us scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own judgement

Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)

Romola had had contact with no mind that could stir the larger possibilities of her nature; they lay folded and crushed like embryonic wings, making no element in her consciousness beyond an occasional vague uneasiness.

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentleman whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

Happily he was modest, and took any second-rate-ness in himself simply as a fact, not as a marvel necessarily to be accounted for by a superiority.

there's nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self — never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming

the majority of us scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own arguments, or the dulness of our own jokes

There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.

The half-indignant remonstrance that vibrated in Deronda's voice came, as often happens, from the habit of inward argument with himself rather than from severity toward Gwendolen: but it had a more beneficial effect on her than any soothings. Nothing is feebler than the indolent rebellion of complaint; and to be roused into self-judgment is comparative activity. For the moment she felt like a shaken child—shaken out of its wailing into awe.

That is a rare and blessed lot which some greatest men have not attained, to know ourselves guiltless before a condemning crowd -- to be sure that what we are denounced for is solely the good in us.

You're like a tipsy man as thinks everybody's had too much but himself.