Quotes About Self-awareness

Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or 'universal goal,' who don't know what to live for, who moan that they must 'find themselves.' You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I'd think it would be the most shameful one.

el castigo es producto de los propios errores

Quien le miente al mundo es esclavo del mundo a partir de ese momento.

He never felt loneliness except when he was happy.

An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: 'It is, therefore I want'. They say: 'I want it, therefore it is.

I'm a perfectly equipped failure.

Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?

Whoever fights monsters," Nietzsche had said, "should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

T]he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.

Was it any consolation, and did we even wish to remember, that what he did to us was what we allowed him to do?

In the Damascus airport she had been humiliated by what she was assumed to be, and when she returned home, she felt angry because of what she could have been.

It is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity.

Be inspired but not proud.

There is a universal reality in ourselves that aligns us with a universal reality that is everywhere.

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don't make someone else clean up your mess.

Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws – the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip.

Don't you know who I am? I'm an individual!           I

I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments always set me on edge? There was a trick there somewhere, although what the trick was, who was doing the tricking, and who was being tricked, eluded my conscious grasp.

I mean dumb choices in the wake of considerable deliberation: those times when you identify a real problem in your life, analyze it, and then with utter confidence come up with precisely the wrong answer.

I don't distinguish between struggling with the world and struggling with myself . . . I enter a pact with other people, other forces in the world, that their problems are mine and mine are theirs . . . The minute others imprint my senses, they become me and I must deal with them or else close part of myself off and make myself and the world smaller, lukewarm.

I recognized that in running for Congress I'd been driven not by some selfless dream of changing the world, but rather by the need to justify the choices I had already made, or to satisfy my ego, or to quell my envy of those who had achieved what I had not.

it's hard not to admit the possibility that I was just desperate for another shot, like an alcoholic rationalizing one last drink.

It's hard, in retrospect, to understand why you did something stupid. I don't mean the small stuff—ruining your favorite tie because you tried to eat soup in the car or throwing out your back because you got talked into playing tackle football on Thanksgiving. I mean dumb choices in the wake of considerable deliberation: those times when you identify a real problem in your life, analyze it, and then with utter confidence come up with precisely the wrong answer