Self Reflection Quotes

When was it exactly that I became... this? By small degrees, I suppose. Once act presses hard upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then one day we look up and fine we are... this.

~ Joe Abercrombie

You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, shoulders and torso, but only from the front, nothing of the back except the backs of your legs if you twist them into the right position, but not your face, never your face, and in the end - at least as far as others are concerned - your face is who you are, the essential fact of your identity. Passports do not contain pictures of hands and feet. Even you, who have lived inside your body for sixty-four years now, would probably be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to speak of your ear, or your elbow, or one of your eyes in close-up. All so familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

~ Paul Auster

Our observer is not affected by emotional ups and downs, our personal life dramas, or by the events of the external world. It is our observer, at the core of our being, that teaches us to let go as we begin identify with it rather than with all the hubbub of our moment-to-moment experience and our mental chatter about it.

~ Marcey Shapiro

The more we connect with our Spiritual self, the uglier sin looks. From the book: Removing Your Shame Label.

~ Eddie Capparucci

It is a blessed gift to witness the beauty of each day.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Writing is a blurred mirror. Sometimes we work harder to see how we are reflected, but often we avert our gaze from the shadowy image.

~ Kristen Twardowski

A writer’s tools are desperation, humiliation, loneliness, love, affection, heartache, happiness, glee, defeat, victory, setbacks, and a desire for personal redemption. People with the experience to know of such things relate that in order to write one must suffer an alleyway of anguish, and experience an array of physical and emotional pain. More than anything else, emotional growth, and writing are each reflective of the immeasurable gain accomplished through studious reflection.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I should learn patience, it's a shame there's no time for that.

~ Maija Haavisto

But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart.

~ C.g. Jung

I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.

~ Shelby Foote

You won't find angels in hell, only demons that know how to play with yours.

~ Shannon L. Alder

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

During self-reflection, the realization came that revolution begins within.

~ Amanda Mosher

...A mirror can trick you day by day into thinking you remain looking and existing in one way forever. But a photograph presents you with the truth: it freezes you eternally, existing as a reminder that you can never, ever go back to any one moment again- that you are always changing, hour by hour, cell by cell, in tiny fragments that build skyscrapers overnight.

~ Kels Adeline Sapp

Begin to see the violence around you, begin to see the violence within you.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Be content with what you have;rejoice in the way things are.When you realize there is nothing lacking,the whole world belongs to you.

~ Lao Tzu

We're so concerned with the idea of what we ought to be that we fail to take into account the things that make us who we really are.

~ Nenia Campbell

Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

~ Cherie Carter-Scott

Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?

~ Clarice Lispector

Time, place, and space for all things, but spending [the] majority of one's time playing in outer places, and far less time exploring inner space, is perhaps the worst form of neglect. Don't play yourself; the real you awaits.

~ T.f. Hodge

To separate yourself from your weakness and look at it objectively is a very powerful thing.

~ Russell Simmons