Quotes about Self-awareness

In humility is the greatest freedom. As soon as you begin to take yourself seriously and imagine that your virtues are important because they are yours, you become the prisoner of your own vanity and even your best works will blind and deceive you. Then, in order to defend yourself, you will begin to see sins and faults everywhere in the actions of other[s].

we too easily assume that we are our real selves, and that our choices are really the ones we want to make when, in fact, our acts of free choice are (though morally imputable, no doubt) largely dictated by psychological compulsions, flowing from our inordinate ideas of our own importance.

When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless.

Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actuallly doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

genuine strength arises only in a condition of vulnerability. The flagrant display and self-serving use of power are an admission of deep incapacity.

It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another mans city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else's life?

Identity is destiny. If you allow your life to be defined by lies or by people who do not truly know who God created you to be, then you will be robbed of both your true identity and your full destiny. Our identity must come from and be found in the Lord.

Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.

Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to a suburb, small town, or a monastery, for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves.

A man who truly knows himself realizes his own worthlessness, and takes no pleasure in the praises of men.

As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.