self-reflection quotes

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn’t give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

A mission statement is not something you write overnight… But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.

You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

Seeing myself on the screen makes me cringe. I understand that I am that way – pouty.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

I’ve lived a very colorful life, and I’ve said some things, But not once have I taken them back, and I’ve never apologized for them – and I won’t.

I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ‚Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.‘

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

A lot of times, I run a thought experiment: ‚If I were not at Facebook, what would I be doing to make the world more open?‘

The more I see the less I know for sure.

Either you’re the one erasing or you’re the one being erased.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.

We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

I’m not a bad person.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

Men must know their limitations.

What nourishes me also destroys me.

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

No parent is perfect; we all can look back and think of things we could’ve done to help our children be better prepared for adulthood. And sometimes it’s best to admit it to them and encourage them to learn from our mistakes.

Be as you wish to seem.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn’t been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that’s really worthwhile.

I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

It’s very hard to live with yourself if you don’t stick with your moral code.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self.

I don’t think anything about a personal legacy. I mean, those words would never come out of my mouth unless I just repeated them. Those things have never been important to me.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind.

Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them.

Solitude is independence.

I don’t think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I’m enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.