Quotes about Self-awareness

There is no one we swindle more than we swindle ourselves. There is no one we run to defend more than we do ourselves. And like every other spiritually blind person, Joe was blind to his blindness.

If you put yourself in the center of your world, you will find plenty of things to complain about.

When you are suffering, you have to force yourself to pay attention to your private conversation, that is, the words you say to yourself that no one else hears.

because we are self-focused, we tend to be scorekeepers, constantly comparing our piles of stuff to the piles of others. It's a life of discontentment and envy. Envy is always selfish.

In a moment, your thoughts can seem more important than they actually are. In a moment, your emotions can seem more reliable than they really are. In a moment, your needs can seem more essential than they truly are.

the more you focus on your own neediness, the more your desires will be christened as needs.

If you aren't daily admitting to yourself that you are a mess and in daily and rather desperate need for forgiving and transforming grace, and if the evidence around has not caused you to abandon your confidence in your own righteousness, then you are going to give yourself to the work of convincing yourself that you are okay.

Without knowing it, we put our identity and inner peace in the hands of the people around us. We look to them for what no flawed human being will ever be able to deliver. We ride the roller coaster of their views of us. We begin to do things not because they are right, but because we know they will please those whose opinion of us and acceptance of us mean more than they should.

Yet we all tend to think that we are more righteous than we are, and when we think this, we have taken the first step to embracing the delusion that maybe we're not so bad in God's eyes after all.

The appropriateness of my responses to others is directly related to the accuracy of my view of myself, and for that there is grace too.

You will always deny your need for God's grace when you are more irritated than convicted. It's possible to be irritated with things in other people that you regularly excuse in yourself.

A joyful life of grace toward others grows best in the soil of gratitude. When I really reflect on who I am, when I take time to consider the grace that I couldn't have earned, achieved, or deserved but which has been lavished on me, and when I remember that that grace came at the cost of the life of another, then I am joyfully motivated to give that grace to others.