self-awareness Quotes

“Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment. Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them - without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune in to what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.”

“I’m slowly learning how to straddle the tension that comes with understanding that I am tough and tender, brave and afraid, strong and struggling - all of these things, all of the time. I’m working on letting go of having to be one or the other and embracing the wholeness of wholeheartedness. The roles in my life - partner, mother, teacher, researcher, leader, entrepreneur - all require me to bring my whole self to the table. We can’t be ‘all in’ if only parts of us show up. If we’re not living, loving, parenting, or leading with our whole, integrated hearts, where doing it halfheartedly.”

“Maybe my problem isn’t that I can’t go home. I will miss my mother and father and Caleb and evening firelight and the clack of my mother’s knitting needles, but that is not the only reason for this hollow feeling in my stomach. My problem might be that even if I did go home, I wouldn’t belong there, among people who give without thinking and care without trying.”

“Every faction conditions its members to think and act a certain way. And most people do it. For most people, it’s not hard to learn, to find a pattern of thought that works and stay that way.” She touches my uninjured shoulder and smiles. “But our minds move in a dozen different directions. We can’t be confined to one way of thinking, and that terrifies our leaders. It means we can’t be controlled. And it means that no matter what they do, we will always cause trouble for them.”

“I step to the side so I stand in front of the mirror. I see muscles that I couldn’t see before in my arms, legs, and stomach. I pinch my side, where a layer of fat used to hint at curves to come. Nothing. Dauntless initiation has stolen whatever softness my body had. Is that good, or bad?”

“Tori was the only one in the tattoo place, so I felt safe getting the symbol of Abnegation—a pair of hands, palms up as if to help someone stand, bounded by a circle—on my right shoulder. I know it was a risk, especially after all that’s happened. But that symbol is a part of my identity, and it felt important to me that I wear it on my skin.”

“No, I was wrong; I didn’t jump off the roof because I wanted to be like the Dauntless. I jumped off because I already was like them, and I wanted to show myself to them. I wanted to acknowledge a part of myself that Abnegation demanded that I hide.”

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”

“This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”

“Before, I never knew how far I would go. Now I believe I have the answer. I will go as far as there is to go. I will go way too far.”

“We’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying: Is that all? Is that all I want? Is something missing?”

“The me I am is not the me I was.”

“Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don’t know it.”

“I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact”

“When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.”

“Mortality is a totally different state of being. You become more aware of time. I was absolutely content as a naiad. I lived in an unchanging state for what must have been many millennia, never thinking of the future or the past, always looking for amusement, always finding it. Almost no self-awareness.”

“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.”

“No matter what happens, always be yourself.”

“We sat still and we held our breath. For our face and our body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt no pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straight and thin and hard and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.”

Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted.

“She said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.’ ”

“No one can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.”

“A traveler I am, and a navigator, and every day I discover a new region within my soul.”

“Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”

“Everybody uses words to express themselves. Except me. And I bet most people don’t realize the real power of words. But I do.”

“Maybe I’m not so different from everyone else after all.”

“But when day came, with a sprinkle of rain, and he looked about him and saw on every side unknown woods, wild heaths, and blue mountains, he thought how large and strange the world was and felt frightened and small.”

“That’s the thing I hated most about Gatlin. The way everyone had something to say about everything you said or did or, in this case, wore.”

“Look deeply into your disappointments, examine your heartache, interrogate your longing, probe your loneliness, meditate honestly on the elements of love of which you are still ignorant, and you will discover that the void within you is already filled with the desire for fulfillment. Your yearning itself is an internal guidance system that is moving you to become a lover.”

“The truth, of course, was that it was all my own self, and my own impiety had divided me against myself. My sin was all the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner.”

“We must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it. We cannot solve a problem by saying ‘It’s not my problem.’ We cannot solve a problem by hoping that someone else will solve it for us. I can solve a problem only when I say ‘ This is my problem and it’s up to me to solve it.’ ”

“The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.”

“Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”

“Maybe you’re just too pretty yourself to be able to see it elsewhere.”

″‘I don’t know that you aren’t. I connect you with a view — a certain type of view. Why shouldn’t you connect me with a room?’ She reflected a moment, and then said, laughing: ‘Do you know that you’re right? I do. I must be a poetess after all. When I think of you it’s always as in a room. How funny!’ To her surprise, he seemed annoyed. ‘A drawing-room, pray? With no view?’ ‘Yes, with no view, I fancy. Why not?’ ‘I’d rather,’ he said reproachfully, ‘that you connected me with the open air.‘”

“The reason we’re such fertile ground for the dark forces of such lies and social manipulation is that we’re dissociated from the genuine light of self-awareness.”

“You must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. It’s easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Any and every narcissist can do that. What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.”

“You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.”

“The woman who is truly self-aware knows that her self is a light from beyond this world, a spiritual essence that has nothing to do with the physical world.”

“When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.”

″ It also is becoming obvious that those who avoid the painful encounter with the unseen are doomed to live a [prideful], boring, and superficial life.”

“He was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t guilty.”

“If an emotion can’t change the condition or the situation you’re dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one. But it’s what I feel. Right, no one said anything about not feeling it.”

“One who cannot listen long and patiently will presently be talking beside the point and be never really speaking to others, albeit he be not conscious of it.”

“If you stick your head in the sand and ignore things that you have the power to change, you can’t blame anyone when they don’t turn out right!”

“I am hope.”

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

“But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God’s love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God.”

“In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”

“But what sort of idiot am I now, when I myself understand that I’m considered an idiot?”

“In that moment of “raw reality,” as Mark Allen has called it, when something inside you asks, How bad do you want it?, an inner curtain is drawn open, revealing a part of you that is not seen except in moments of crisis. And when your answer is to keep pushing, you come away from the trial with the kind of self-knowledge and self-respect that can’t be bought.”

You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who would make you so.

“I have been Foolish and Deluded,” said he, “and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.”

“For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.”

“Pooh,” said Rabbit kindly, “you haven’t any brain.” “I know,” said Pooh humbly.

Mr Crofton sat down on a box and looked fixedly at the other bottle on the hob. He was silent for two reasons. The first reason, sufficient in itself, was that he had nothing to say; the second reason was that he considered his companions beneath him. He had been a canvasser for Wilkins, the Conservative, but when the Conservatives had withdrawn their man and, choosing the lesser of two evils, given their support to the Nationalist candidate, he had been engaged to work for Mr Tierney.

“Don’t you know what Tiggers like?” asked Pooh. “I expect if I thought very hard I should,” said Christopher Robin, “but I thought Tigger knew.” “I do,” said Tigger. “Everything there is in the world except honey and haycorns and—what were those hot things called?” “Thistles.” “Yes, and those.”

I was never the one to pretend to be what I wasn’t.

“Perhaps I’m being an ass, just a melodramatic ass. Well, I hope I am.”

“I had many bright thoughts in my bath this morning,” began Antony. “The brightest one of all was that we were being damn fools, and working at this thing from the wrong end altogether.”

“It was very wicked of me to fly into a temper because you told me the truth. It was the truth; every word you said was true. My hair is red and I’m freckled and skinny and ugly. What I said to you was true, too, but I shouldn’t have said it.”

“That’s one good thing about me. I never do the same naughty thing twice.”

“Oh, dear, what a blunderbuss I am!”

“I have already told thee what I am! A fiend! Who made me so?”

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”

“It’s nice to have accomplishments and be elegant, but not to show off or get perked up,” said Amy thoughtfully.

“It’s my dreadful temper! I try to cure it, I think I have, and then it breaks out worse than ever. Oh, Mother, what shall I do? What shall I do?”

“You don’t know, you can’t guess how bad it is! It seems as if I could do anything when I’m in a passion. I get so savage, I could hurt anyone and enjoy it. I’m afraid I shall do something dreadful some day, and spoil my life, and make everybody hate me. Oh, Mother, help me, do help me!”

“I am not patient by nature, and it tried me very much to see my children wanting anything.”

“Between ourselves, Jo, some of the girls I know really do go on at such a rate I’m ashamed of them. They don’t mean any harm, I’m sure, but if they knew how we fellows talked about them afterward, they’d mend their ways, I fancy.”

“It’s very curious, but the more I try to satisfy myself with all sorts of natural affections, the more I seem to want. I’d no idea hearts could take in so many. Mine is so elastic, it never seems full now, and I used to be quite contented with my family. I don’t understand it.”

Dinner went off gayly, and although my guardian seemed to follow rather than originate subjects, I knew that he wrenched the weakest part of our dispositions out of us. For myself, I found that I was expressing my tendency to lavish expenditure, and to patronise Herbert, and to boast of my great prospects, before I quite knew that I had opened my lips.

“You know what I am, don’t you?”

Everybody should know his own business.

“I kill nothing,—I am too little,—but I drive goats toward such as can use them.

“So my reason has not quite deserted me, so I still have some sense and memory, since I guessed it of myself,”

And how dared I, knowing myself, knowing how I should be, take up an axe and shed blood! I ought to have known beforehand.... Ah, but I did know!

“Forgive me for my evil thoughts, and my slander.”