Quotes about Self-awareness

True happiness... arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self.

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

I can't really put it into words; in any case I am not yet as honest with myself as I should be and it is always hard to get to the bottom of things with words.

We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world.

My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response, and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.

Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries.

But there is an older wisdom that puts it differently: by changing our behavior we can change our feelings.

Prayer is a way of language practiced in the presence of God in which we become more than ourselves while remaining ourselves.

These labels are inevitable and in many ways useful but the common element to them is that they are impersonal and partial; when they become all-encompassing, which they too frequently do, they distort our core identity. They say almost nothing, or what is even worse, the wrong thing, about who we actually are.

Every time you criticize someone, you condemn yourself. It takes one to know one. Judgmental criticism of others is a well-known way of escaping detection in your own crimes and misdemeanors.

I knew I was born at the North but hoped nobody would find it out. I looked upon the misfortune as something so shrouded by time and distance that maybe nobody remembered it.

I know very well the difference between my image and who I am.