self-reflection quotes

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

There are a lot of things I never did, because I believe in watching those true Hollywood stories and I see how easy it is to lose track of your life.

The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

These are all personal crises, I’m sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It’s as simple as that.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.

Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.

The reason I talk to myself is that I’m the only one whose answers I accept.

I am never satisfied with myself and that is what keeps me going – I have no post-satisfaction.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

When it comes to everybody else’s thing and their lane and their timing, I’m never doing anything intentional to, like, come after somebody. That will always be my biggest mistake or anybody’s biggest mistake if that’s their intention.

The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one’s self.

Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don’t have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‚in denial‘ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.

All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

We all self-conscious. I’m just the first to admit it.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

Don’t ever forget two things I’m going to tell you. One, don’t believe everything that’s written about you. Two, don’t pick up too many checks.

I thought I would be a guy on the radio.

Returning to your family and where you came from, and your history… this is what makes you strong. It’s not looking out that’s going to do that – it’s looking in.

Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

It seems like we wake up and it’s a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, ‚What the hell am I doing?‘

I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.

Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I?

I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency.

The happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

Somewhere deep down there’s a decent man in me, he just can’t be found.

I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don’t know how to manage it.

Occasionally the conflict between ‚what we stand for‘ and ‚what we do‘ has been forthrightly addressed.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

I try not to think about my life. I have no life. I need therapy.

I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.