Quotes about Self-awareness

In my love-challenged condition, seeing a difficulty for someone else can leave me feeling a little more smug or superior-by-comparison.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true.

Our most meaningful relationships are based on a longing for expansion rather than a preoccupation with comfort and security. To live exuberantly—to fully know and be fully known by another—we must be prepared to illuminate the dark spots in our most intimate relationships and in our selves.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.112 They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

being connected in a shallow way to the entire world can prevent us from being deeply connected to those closest to us—including ourselves.

Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

Be merciful to yourself, stop fighting yourself quite so much. Maybe what you are asking of yourself, what you're driving yourself to do or to be, what you put a gun to your own back to make yourself do, is something at this point you needn't have to think about doing. So, think back at the end of the day to the wars you're involved in. How are they going?

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence

Humility does not mean a submissiveness, a passiveness, a willingness to be walked on, or a desire to live in the doghouse. Humility is a virtue by which we recognize ourselves as we really are, not as we would like to be in the eyes of the public; not as our press notices say we are, but as we are in the sight of God when we examine our conscience.

God can do something with those who see what they really are and who know their need of cleansing but can do nothing with the man who feels himself worthy.