Quotes About Self-awareness

People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed.

Set any one to talk about himself, instead of about other people, and you will have a seam of the precious mental metal opened up to you at once; only ore, most likely, that needs much smelting and refining; or it may be, not gold at all, but a metal which your mental alchemy may turn into gold.

It is strange, but so it is, that many a man never sees himself until he becomes aware of the eyes of other men fixed upon him; they seeing him, and he knowing that they see him, then first, even to himself, will he confess what he may have long all but known.

But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!

I am content to be to myself what I would be. What I choose to seem to myself makes me what I am. My own thought makes me me; my own thought of myself is me. Another shall not make me! But another has made you, and can compel you to see what you have made yourself. You will not be able much longer to look to yourself anything but what he sees you! You will not much longer have satisfaction in the thought of yourself. At this moment you are aware of the coming change!

Why, you don't seem even to know the good of the things you are constantly doing. Now don't mistake me. I don't mean you are good for doing them. It is a good thing to eat your breakfast, but you don't fancy it's very good of you to do it. The thing is good, not you.

The injunction is not to hide what you do from others, but to hide it from yourself. The Master would have you not plume yourself upon it, not cherish the thought that you have done it, or confer with yourself in satisfaction over it. You must not count it to your praise. A man must not desire to be satisfied with himself. His right hand must not seek the praise of his left hand.

People are so ready to think themselves change when it is only their mood that is changed! Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in one case , the fine weather has got them, in the other the rainy.

kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call our self.

Never suspecting what a noble creature he was meant to be, he never saw what a poor creature he was

it wasn't that I'd grown any braver as I got older - the reverse if anything

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.

The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.

When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness.

You do not exist. I think I exist. I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.

Women who do not marry wither up - they wither up like aspidistras in back-parlour windows; and the devilish thing is that they don't even know they're withering.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system

You are rotting away, you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.

Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had change inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt.

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

Snobbishness is one of those vices which we can discern in everyone else but never in ourselves.

But this sense of guilt and inevitable failure was balanced by something else: that is, the instinct to survive. Even a creature that is weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly and in no way justifiable still wants to stay alive and be happy after its own fashion. I could not invert the existing scale of values, or turn myself into a success, but I could accept my failure and make the best of it. I could resign myself to being what I was, and then endeavour to survive on those terms.