self-reflection quotes

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

What you are comes to you.

I don’t do research. I never have.

What it’s like to be me? You know, it’s good to be me. My life is good.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

I hope not to define myself by suffering.

The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution – this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

I try to be the same person I was yesterday.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

I’m an introvert somewhat. There could be a room full of people, I’ll go stand in the corner.

It started to weigh on me that I was responsible for the moves that had made me successful, but I wasn’t reaping the lion’s share of the profits, and that was problematic for me.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.

I used to worry about every little thing, trying to figure out every problem. Well, I realize now how foolish that was. I was no more in control of my life than the man on the moon.

When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‚I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.‘ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.

It’s easy to forget who you are.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.

What the heck is true love? I remember feeling, back when I was 12 and ‚going‘ with this girl, ‚Is this true love?‘

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that’s true to some degree.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not. I’m really confused now.

Some Christians feel guilty when they are doing something that isn’t ‚spiritual.‘ Somehow or another, they feel the need to hurry through the grocery store, dash through the house cleaning, and rush through all the daily aspects of life that seem irrelevant to their faith.

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?

I have the problems of, I must confess, old age.

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

For me, one of the toughest things about Valentine’s Day is that it gets geared up as the day to profess your love. See, T-E-S-T – that’s a bad word that doesn’t go with L-O-V-E.

I think I have a dualistic nature.

I listen to my old records and I think, ‚How did I ever get on the radio?‘

Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside.

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

I’m a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that’s never healthy.

The self is hateful.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

I really didn’t consider myself happy or unhappy.

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

The Army will take its lessons learned. They’re excellent at looking into themselves and reflecting on what did we do right, what did we do wrong.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

I’ve never been pregnant, so I just feel God didn’t mean for me to have kids so that everybody else’s children could be mine.

I can never say ‚why‘ about anything I do. I suppose I can say ‚how‘ and ‚when‘ and ‚what.‘ But ‚why‘ is impenetrable to me.

When you are angry or frustrated, what comes out? Whatever it is, it’s a good indication of what you’re made of.

Sometimes we be playing the politics too much and forget who we are just to win.