Quotes about Self-reflection

The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself ... the latter I translate into a new tongue.

The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self it is no humility for a man to think less of himself than he ought, though it might rather puzzle him to do that.

The only monster you need to worry about in this life is the one that stares at you from the mirror each morning. You tame him, make friends with him, and the rest of life is nothing you can't handle.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

I'm only going to stand before God and give an account for my life, not for somebody else's life. If I have a bad attitude, then I need to say there's no point in me blaming you for what's wrong in my life.

A sense of our inadequacies and failings, a recognition that we could be better people than we usually are, is one of the forces for moral growth and improvement in our society. An appropriate sense of guilt makes people try to be better. But an excessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem and perhaps of our capacity to grow and to act.

We can do our best to change people, to summon them to be whom they are capable of being, but ultimately they only people we will always have the power to change will be ourselves.

Sometimes, if we can't find another person to dump our anger on, we turn it on ourselves. The textbook definition of depression is anger turned inward instead of being discharged outward.

But C. S. Lewis made the point that we hate sin but love the sinner all the time — in our own lives. In other words, when we're judging ourselves, we always love the sinner despite our sin. We accept ourselves, even though we might not always like our behavior.

In the end you have only you.