Quotes About Self-awareness

My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other's self on the street — what do we have to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya! That's about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look.

I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I am much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That's just the kind of person I am. I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox.

She hadn't been hurt in any real way, had she? No one had treated her badly. I must just be overly sensitive to things, she convinced herself.

At nineteen, I knew nothing about the inner workings of my own heart, let alone the hearts of others. Still, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how happiness and sadness worked. What I couldn't yet grasp were all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other. As a result, I often felt anxious and helpless.

We had been playing our assigned roles on the office stage, but stepping down from the stage, abandoning the images that we had been projecting there, we were both just unstable, awkward lumps of flesh, warm pieces of meat kitted out with digestive tracts and hearts and brains and reproductive organs.

It made me wonder how other people saw me. Not that I had any way of knowing, of course.

that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain idiosyncrasies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, and though you might want to correct them, it doesn't happen overnight, and if you try to force the issue in one case, something else might go funny.

The years 19 and 20 are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older. It's true. So think about it carefully.

All I can do is live the life I have. I can't trade it in for a new one. However strange and misshapen it might be, this is it for the gene carrier that is me.

There is absolutely nothing to be gained from sleeping with one strange woman after another. It just tires you out and makes you disgusted with yourself.

The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves

You're not telling me anything I don't know already. 'Relax your body, and the rest of you will ligthen up.' What's the point of saying that to me? If I relaxed my body now, I'd fall apart. I've always lived like this, and its' the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I'd never find my way back. I'd go to pieces, and the pieces would be blown away. Why can't you see that? How can you talk about watching over me if you can't see that?

that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities

Trouble is we end up being worse at saying things well. It's got to be an inborn fault. Naturally, everyone's got faults. My biggest fault is that the faults i was born with grow bigger each year.

It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.

There are some things about myself I can't explain to anyone. There are some things I don't understand at all. I can't tell what I think about things or what I'm after. I don't know what my stregths are or what I'm supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail, the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared, I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I'm not such a wonderful human being.

I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language. Olga was absolutely right, Tsukuru thought as he sipped his wine. Not just to explain to others, but to explain to yourself. Force yourself to try to explain it, and you create lies.

Now I'm not trying to make excuses, but I don't get turned on by that many women. If anything, I think of myself as more the non-turn-on type. So when I do get turned on, I don't trust it; I have to investigate the source.

Sometimes we avoid checking in on our progress because we don't want to acknowledge how little progress we've made.

When the 75 members of Stanford Graduate School of Business's Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness.

The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen.

One is either perfectly present and entirely innocent of one's own contentment (which is remarkably like not being content) or one is aware, and thus distanced, and no longer at home or happy. Am I wrong?