self-reflection quotes

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

Maybe ‚loner‘ is too strong a word, but I’ve always enjoyed being on my own.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

I have many regrets, and I’m sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret… if you have any sense, and if you don’t regret them, maybe you’re stupid.

It definitely has learning a lesson about the way you’re living your life. I wouldn’t compare our movie to that, but it has a structure where it’s about a man who doesn’t appreciate all that he has and finds out at the end that life has been great and he has to enjoy that.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

I don’t really get nervous that much, or if I do, only I know. It’s all inside me. I am good at hiding everything.

I owe my solitude to other people.

I think I have always had a little humor.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

I’m giving all that I have in this life. I’m opening up my notebook, and I’m saying everything in there out loud.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

As you think, so shall you become.

I had my moments of being humiliated, and then I had moments of doing something humiliating. I’m glad I lived out both roles.

I’m still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

Nobody knows me.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it’s almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

I am proud of having done what I’ve done. Very proud.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.

We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.

When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

I don’t write so much now. I’m getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

I’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.

For a young person, it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the ageing person, it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can – that is their secret.

I’m so wrapped up in my work that it’s often impossible to consider other things in my life. My marriage ended in divorce because of this, my relationship with Holly has suffered by this.

My friends, there are no friends.

I’ve always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

Observe all men, thyself most.

You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal.

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

I can be a cruel person.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.

No one can give you better advice than yourself.

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man’s life.

As a kid, I’d go into the bathroom when I was having a tantrum. I’d be in the bathroom crying, studying myself in the mirror. I was preparing for future roles.

It’s only I have seen enough of it and the funny thing is now, I know that I’m skinny, because I know there are even smaller clothes in the store. I think I’m big, when I was big, I never thought about it.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.