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.

What can you ever really know of other people's souls - of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole of creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculation about your neighbours or memories of what you have read in books.

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

I would say the world's in terrible shape, but I'm afraid the world would say, 'Look who's talking!'

As much as people pretend 'I fit in, I understand, I get the rules,' there are always times spent away from that where you go, 'I thought I knew. It seemed so clear to me, and then...' That sense of loneliness, or the sense of not fitting in or being out of depth, is probably the most common denominator.

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

You still don't know what you do well.

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.

Il ne faut pas s'offenser que les autres nous cachent la verite, puisque nous nous la cachons si souvent a nous-memes.

Tout le monde se plaint de sa memoire, et personne ne se plaint de son jugement.

Il est plus aise d'etre sage pour les autres que de l'etre pour soi-meme.

Qui vit sans folie n'est pas si sage qu'il croit.

Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier, simpler.

I like you-I have no taste-but I like you.

That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

Jesus knew - knew - that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff.

All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with Man is Man.

Accuracy is vexing to a crowd of would-be fantasizers. Hasn't our age coined the term 'escapism,' when in fact the only way to escape oneself is to allow oneself to be invaded?

The spirits that I summoned up I now can't rid myself of.

Da stehe ich nun, ich armer Thor! Und bin so klug als wie zuvor.

Schon war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

It's not that age brings childhood back again, age merely shows what children we remain.

One has only to grow older to become more tolerant. I see no fault that I might not have committed myself.

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

You never think you're on the verge of disaster while you're looking over the edge yourself. It's your friends and family who are trying to get you to stop destroying yourself and after a while it kind of sank in and I just cleaned up my act. (2004)

I wasn't the best kid in the world, but I wasn't an ax murderer, either. (1988)

Perhaps the enemies of liberty are such only because they judge it by its loud voice. If they knew its charms, the dignity that accompanies it, how much a free man feels like a king, the perpetual inner light that is produced by decorous self-awareness and realization, perhaps there would be no greater friends of freedom than those who are its worst enemies.

'We all self conscious I'm just the first to admit it'

'You will be very welcome,' answered Dorothy, 'for you will help to keep away the other wild beasts. It seems to me they must be more cowardly than you are if they allow you to scare them so easily.' 'They really are,' said the Lion, 'but that doesn't make me any braver, and as long as I know myself to be a coward I shall be unhappy.'

Obviously I watched the movies and the TV shows, but I guess I wasn't aware how deeply the influence was affecting me.

Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense. (p. 56e)

C'est une epineuse entreprise, et plus qu'il ne semble, de suivre une allure si vagabonde que celle de notre esprit; de penetrer les profondeurs opaques de ses replis internes; de choisir et arreter tant de menus de ses agitations.

One must marry one's feelings to one's beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one's life.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others.

I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

To be honest, I am a little bit crazy. I accept that. I've always been outrageous. I've never been the every day you. I've always gone over the top with everything.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

Anybody can talk me round. If I were in a Trappist monastery, the first thing that would happen would be that some smooth performer would lure me into some frightful idiocy against my better judgment by means of the deaf-and-dumb language.

Pavarotti is not vain, but conscious of being unique.

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

Open suspecting others comes of secret condemning themselves.

The loss which is unknown is no loss at all.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have.

All normal human beings have soi-disant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts: those who know this and those who do not.

The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He sees that they consistently are doing exactly that which they accuse the Sophists of doing... using emotionally persuasive language for the ulterior purpose of making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic, appear the stronger. We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.

My life has been one long series of mistakes.

Why would I read one of mine? I know how they come out!

Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill'd with luxuries, and embellish'd with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy'd by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory. I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.

Humor is a sense of proportion and a power of seeing yourself from the outside.