299 Self awareness Quotes

How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

Do they think that I am such a damned fool as to think myself fit for President of the United States? No, sir; I know what I am fit for. I can command a body of men in a rough way, but I am not fit to be President.

When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.

Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line.

You should know me well enough by now to know I don't ask for things I don't think I can get.

Look, it's one of the great mysteries of the world, I cannot answer that question. I think I'm vaguely blonde. To be perfectly frank, I don't know.

I'm a terrible long-term planner.

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

The man of character, sensitive to the meaning of what he is doing, will know how to discover the ethical paths in the maze of possible behavior.

I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.

An empty man is full of himself.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Do not give sentence in another tribunal till you have been yourself judged in the tribunal of Justice.

A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.

Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.

We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.

Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. I have been called all of these. Of course, I am.

I've been too many places. I'm like the bad penny.

Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being.

No temptation can gravitate to a man unless there is that is his heart which is capable of responding to it.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

Though man a thinking being is defined, Few use the grand prerogative of mind. How few think justly of the thinking few! How many never think, who think they do!

Some felt I'm not academically qualified, and they're right.

Loving-if the answering breast Seem not to be thus possessed, Still in hoping have a care; If it do, beware, beware! But if in yourself you find it, Above all things-mind it, mind it!

When there is freedom from mechanical conditioning, there is simplicity. The classical man is just a bundle of routine, ideas and tradition. If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow - you are not understanding yourself.

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves. (From the 'Cosmos' television series, 'Blues for the Red Planet')

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.

Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

There do exist enquiring minds, which long for the truth of the heart, seek it, strive to solve the problems set by life, try to penetrate to the essence of things and phenomena and to penetrate into themselves. If a man reasons and thinks soundly, no matter which path he follows in solving these problems, he must inevitably arrive back at himself, and begin with the solution of the problem of what he is himself and what his place is in the world around him. For without this knowledge, he will have no focal point in his search. Socrates' words, 'Know thyself' remain for all those who seek true knowledge and being.

I'm the master of low expectations... I'm also not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things.

I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said to myself softly the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

But there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.

Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold, which the owner knows not of.

'Twas thine own genius gave the final blow, And help'd to plant the wound that laid thee low: So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain, No more through rolling clouds to soar again, View'd his own feather on the fatal dart, And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart.

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.

If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.

The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself ... The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.

Man is the 'ethical animal' -ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment-like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being-is based upon his consciousness of himself.

Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one an temporarily evade reality ... but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within.

'I'd like to believe there's a little of Hitler and Napoleon in me. Even if I try, I can't be as selfless as Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa. I'd like to believe there's a little of Hitler and Napoleon in me. Even if I try, I can't be as selfless as Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa.'

When I left him, I reasoned thus with myself: I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.

'For most people, self-awarness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. Its about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass'

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.

To be quite candid - and what I am going to say now is something I have never said before, and I hope that it provokes a salutory chill - I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

I never know whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest.

I have an ego the size of a small planet

A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself

This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer

The grandeur of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable.

Does nobody understand?

Oh Lord! If you but knew what a brimstone of a creature I am behind all this beautiful amiability!

For most of us, the seductive and unstated part of 'if I had enough time' is the unstated sentence 'to hear myself think.' In other words, we imagine that if we had time we would quiet our more shallow selves and listen to a deeper flow of inspiration. Again, this is a myth that lets us off the hook- if I wait for enough time to listen, I don't have to listen now, I don't have to take responsibility for what is trying to bubble up today.

I am the very slave of circumstance And impulse,-borne away with every breath!

I fear I'll do some damage One fine day But I would not be convicted By a jury of my peers Still crazy Still crazy Still crazy after all these years.

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves!

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing. ~ Ch. 3

I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. '(Ender's Game) Spoken by Ender

Few men during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used. ~ CH. 7

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion. What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us An' ev'n Devotion

The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness, of others' strength and greatness. He is proud of his great generals but not proud of himself. He admires thought which he did not have and not the thought he did have. He believes in things all the more thoroughly the less he comprehends them, and does not believe in the correctness of those ideas which he comprehends most easily

Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails; and he takes the most elaborate pains to bring these thoughts to light in a form which is by turns abstract and familiar, conciliatory and aggressive, obvious and inferential, comic and puzzling. In a word, Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought - certainly the most conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism. Yet it is by excess of honesty that Shaw himself lent color to his representation as an inconsequential buffoon bent on monopolizing the spotlight.

I don't know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed it, and I don't care

'I'm not stupid!' In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy. -Ender's Shadow

It is admirable to consider how many Millions of People come into, and go out of the World, Ignorant of themselves, and of the World they have lived in. (1)

Mankind naturally and generally love to be flatter'd: Whatever sooths our Pride, and tends to exalt our Species above the rest of the Creation, we are pleas'd with and easily believe, when ungrateful Truths shall be with the utmost Indignation rejected. 'What! bring ourselves down to an Equality with the Beasts of the Field! with the meanest part of the Creation! 'Tis insufferable!' But, (to use a Piece of common Sense) our Geese are but Geese tho' we may think 'em Swans; and Truth will be Truth tho' it sometimes prove mortifying and distasteful.

Three years ago I was forty... forty! Four-oh! That slipped out. Now I suddenly feel as if I've taken all my clothes off.

Epictetus goes much further when he asks: Why do we not lose our temper if someone tells us that we have a headache, while we do lose it if someone says there is anything wrong with our arguments or our choice? (80)

Clarity: 'Change will never happen when people lack the ability and courage to see themselves for who they are.'

On n'est jamais excusable d'etre mechant, mais il y a quelque merite a savoir qu'on l'est; et le plus irreparable des vices est de faire le mal par betise.

Everything's different. You have to recognise the fact that I'm different. Time goes on, and you change. I'm coming into this as a different guy, that's probably the biggest thing.

He has the strength (and of course the limitations) of the recluse, who, though not afraid of the world, always stands at a slight angle to it.

We probed into the nature of space and time, and of the universal, both with regard to external nature and with regard to mind. But then, we went on to consider the general disorder and confusion that pervades the consciousness of mankind. It is here that I encountered what I feel to be Krishnamurti's major discovery. What he was seriously proposing is that all this disorder, which is the root cause of such widespread sorrow and misery, and which prevents human beings from properly working together, has its root in the fact that we are ignorant of the general nature of our own processes of thought. Or to put it differently it may be said that we do not see what is actually happening, when we are engaged in the activity of thinking.

She is, like most of my friends, a terrible judge of character.

You think you impress the Rock?

I was just an enthusiastic mountaineer of modest abilities who was willing to work quite hard and had the necessary imagination and determination. I was just an average bloke; it was the media that transformed me into a heroic figure. And try as I did, there was no way to destroy my heroic image. But as I learned through the years, as long as you didn't believe all that rubbish about yourself, you wouldn't come to much harm.

If you have assumed a character beyond your strength, you have both played a poor figure in that, and neglected one that is within your powers. (79)

It was because of this guy I had gone out with and had been really, really close with. I really loved him. I felt that he was my best friend. But he was a teenaged guy, and they don't think a lot of times. He mistreated me and then he came back. I couldn't even be friends with him for awhile. I cared about him, but it was just a situation where he kept trying to be friends with me, but I knew that he just wanted to be friends with me so he could have the option of making a move on me whenever he wanted to. And because I was so infatuated with him, and even in love with him, I was always available for that. It made me feel weak every time I would fall for that. And I would look forward to him making a move on me, but I knew that it was wrong. I knew that he was playing with me. And after awhile, I didn't even care anymore because I wanted him so much.

The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.

As the Greeks sensibly believed, should you get to know yourself, you will have penetrated as much of the human mystery as anyone need ever know.

I smoke every minute that I'm awake and have since I was 15, It's so stupid; it doesn't even get me high. Which is just as well, I suppose. My mind's been altered enough.