Selected self reflection quotes

1. Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.

2. Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why Miss Crawford always plays ladies.

3. Anything you see in me is in you. If you want to see a vicious killer, that's who you'll see, do you understand that? If you see me as your brother, that's what I'll be. It all depends on how much love you have. I am you, and when you can admit that, you will be free. I am just a mirror.

4. I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.

5. Here is a list of fearful things: The jaws of sharks, a vulture's wings, The rabid bite of the dog's of war, The voice of one who went before. But most of all the mirror's gaze, which counts us out our numbered days.

6. If you're going to condemn a people based on the actions of the worst of its ranks; take a good look at the worst of your people first and judge yourself.

7. At least half of my life's many mistakes can be safely put down to impetuosity: the other half derive from inertia.

8. Man, I was tame compared to what they do now. Are you kidding? I didn't do anything but just jiggle.

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

10. 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.

11. I feel coming on a strange disease - humility.

12. It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.

13. Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

14. If it's dangerous to talk to yourself, it's probably even dicier to listen.

15. The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

16. In my books I might hold the mirror to my own face. If others would like to borrow the mirror, they're welcome. The books aren't there to accuse others - merely to raise issues and keep the debates alive.

17. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

18. Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

19. The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original.

20. Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?

21. For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

22. This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.

23. I cannot bear to look at a film that I made before 1990. Maybe 1985. There's no sense even trying to explain it. I really just can't watch myself. I see all the machinery at work and it just drives me nuts, so I don't look at anything.

24. You can't be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning: 'Holy Christ, whaddya know - I'm still around!' It's absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.

25. I know absolutely nothing about music.

26. I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!

27. If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.

28. We have met the enemy and he is us.

29. The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?

30. When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.

31. Maybe I'm lucky to be going so slowly, because I may be going in the wrong direction.

32. Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?

33. To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years .

34. We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

35. What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

36. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.

37. What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.

38. 'You know, we all have our inner demons. I, for one -- I can`t speak for you, but I`m on the verge of moral collapse at any time. It can happen by the end of the show.'

39. 'Whatever you laugh at in others, laughs at yourself.'

40. Let me look at the foulness and ugliness of my body. Let me see myself as an ulcerous sore running with every horrible and disgusting poison.

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

42. I found a delivery in my flaw.

43. My worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along.

44. When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

45. In Germany there is much complaining about my 'eccentricities.' But since it is not known where my center is, it won't be easy to find out where or when I have thus far been 'eccentric.' That I was a philologist, for example, meant that I was outside my center (which fortunately does not mean that I was a poor philologist). Likewise, I now regard my having been a Wagnerian as eccentric. It was a highly dangerous experiment; now that I know it did not ruin me, I also know what significance it had for me - it was the most severe test of my character.

46. The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water: I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky:but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.

47. The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is - not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.

48. Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

49. At first I was almost about to despair, I thought I never could bear it - but I did I bear it. The question remains: how?

50. Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, - returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at 'em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

51. I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

52. Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

53. Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted.

54. When a man stops to ponder his physical or moral condition, he generally finds he is ill.

55. Resolved, to ask myself at the end of every day, week, month and year, wherein I could possibly in any respect have done better.

56. Resolved, to confess frankly to myself all that which I find in myself, either infirmity or sin; and, if it be what concerns religion, also to confess the whole case to God, and implore needed help.

57. Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.

58. Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble.

59. Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

60. Who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

61. I used to pray that God would do this or that. Now I pray only that God will make his will known to me.

62. How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.

63. First melted off the hope of youth Then Fancy's rainbow fast withdrew And then experience told me truth In mortal bosoms never grew 'Twas grief enough to think mankind All hollow servile insincere But worse to trust to my own mind And find the same corruption there

64. It's expensive being me.