Quotes about Self-awareness

But taking love itself—God's kind of love—into the depths of our being through spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first.

Only the humble person will let God be God. Such people are realistic about who they actually are.

The truth of the matter is that people are obsessed with themselves. This is often caused by the wounds they have received. When you hit your thumb with a hammer, what happens in the following days? You are very mindful of your thumb. The same is true when we are hurt; we become conscious of ourselves to such an extent that we are imprisoned in that consciousness.

So God uses our self-knowledge or self-awareness, which is heightened and given a special quality by his presence and direction, to search us out and reveal to us the truth about ourselves and our world.

Practice in not speaking can at least give us enough control over what we say that our tongues do not "go off" automatically. This discipline provides us with a certain inner distance that gives us time to consider our words fully and the presence of mind to control what we say and when we say it.

Great part of our growth includes disengaging from the expectations of others.

They presume on their justification in being whatever they are—unlike a thought, which by nature is open to challenge and invites the question "Why?

The route to facing what we feel is not by devaluing the darkness of what we feel, but by valuing the deep structure of why we don't want to feel. Once we face why feeling is so hard, then we can move beyond what we feel to the deeper energy within us that keeps us from grappling honestly with our emotions. Then we will not only feel more deeply, but—more importantly—we will feel our feelings in a way that exposes our struggle with God.

Defensiveness often reveals an area of our lives where we're in denial.

If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.

I have no resentments, no complaints, no ax to grind. I simply feel what I feel and do what I do.

Your age doesn't define your maturity; your grades don't define your ability; and what people say about you doesn't define who you are.