Quotes about Self-awareness

In my experience, when we project a quality or virtue onto another human being, we ourselves almost always already possess that quality, but we're afraid to embrace (and to live) that truth.

I've read a dozen different versions of Stanislavski's famous Three Questions, i.e. the queries an actor must ask him- or herself before playing any scene. Here's my version: Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want? The second two are pretty easy. It's the first that's the killer.

Doctors estimate that seventy to eighty percent of their business is non-health-related. People aren't sick, they're self- dramatizing. Sometimes the hardest part of a medical job is keeping a straight face. As Jerry Seinfeld observed of his twenty years of dating: That's a lot of acting fascinated.

The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment.

Our past may explain why we're suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.

When you're young you believe it when people tell you how good you are. And that's the danger, you inhale. Everyone will tell you you're a genius, which you are not, and if you understand that, you win.

I don't consider myself an intellectual. And this is not one of my aims. But I admire intellectual people.

That dreadful consciousness of a narrow and limiting I-hood which dogs our search for freedom and full life, is done away. For a moment, at least, the independent spiritual life is achieved. The contemplative is merged in it "like a bird in the air, like a fish in the sea": loses to find and dies to live.

When are we closest to God? When we see ourselves as we really are.

Anxiety and fear are like baby tigers: The more you feed them, the stronger they grow.

If we don't know who we are, we'll never know how we ought to live.

We never gain in life by hurting others. Sometimes we try to elevate our own insecure egos by degrading and belittling those around us. Yet this produces only a false sense of self-esteem.