Quotes about Self-awareness

Be content to seem what you really are.

Look within. Within is the fountain of Good, ready always to well forth if thou wilt alway delve.

What is outside the scope of my mind has absolutely no concern with my mind. Learn this lesson and thou standest erect.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.

Your friend is intellectually honourable, Jimmy's mother would say. He doesn't lie to himself.

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward.

That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose.