149 Quotes Tagged: self-awareness

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.

The Way to do is to be.

"From "Wetness and Water"

How does a part of the world leave the world?
How can wetness leave water?

Do not try to put out a fire
by throwing on more fire.
Do not wash a wound with blood.

No matter how fast you run,
your shadow more than keeps up.
Sometimes it's in front.

Only full, overhead sun
diminishes your shadow.

But that shadow has been serving you.
What hurts you blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest."

As females, most of us have spent a lifetime being inundated with the message that our worth is inextricably linked to our attractiveness. We are trained from our earliest years to turn a critical eye on ourselves: Are we thin enough? Too thin? Tall enough? Too tall? Athletic enough? Too athletic? Curvy enough? Too curvy? And the list goes on. The ideal of attractiveness is mercurial and capricious, ever-shifting and forever-out-of-reach. It is an impossible ideal by its very nature. And it is a lie. To walk through life with calm assurance, clothed in confidence in our femininity and self-worth, requires that we first recognize and reject the lie that our worth is tied to our attractiveness. We must learn to appreciate and accept the endless array of attributes that make each of us a wonderfully and gorgeously unique human. We must discover for ourselves the truth that our worth lies solely in our existence. That to exist is to be worthy of love and acceptance and fulfillment and companionship and tenderness and happiness. When we can see and accept that our existence is what makes us worthy, we will finally be able to accept our own worthiness, to love our female skin in all of its unique glory, and to walk confidently and comfortably in a world desperate for the love that we can now freely give.

It takes courage...to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.

Εσφαλμένη κρίση! Οι ταπεινώσεις για τα παλιά μας λάθη ήταν έργο της περηφάνειας. Ο φόβος για το μέλλον ήταν κι αυτός αλαζονεία. Πίσω, ολέθρια περηφάνεια της νεότητας! Είναι τόσο όμορφο να ξαναβρίσκεις την γαλήνη της ψυχής σου, όταν δεν πλάθεις πια ένα Θεό βίας αλλά αγάπης.

Don't look shy if you wear rag and people gag, many are in the grave wearing skeleton, and you should even be happier for wearing a skin without clothes.

"Life is a river," a wise friend told me. "It's flowing. You're never at the same place twice."

He said sometimes when you're young you have to think about things, because you're forming your value-sets and you keep coming up with Data Insufficient and finding holes in your programs. So you keep trying to do a fix on your sets. And the more powerful your mind is and the more intense your concentration is, the worse damage you can do to yourself, which is why, Justin says, Alphas always have trouble and some of them go way off and out-there, and why almost all Alphas are eccentric. But he says the best thing you can do if you're too bright for your own good is what the Testers do, be aware where you got which idea, keep a tab on everything, know how your ideas link up with each other and with your deep-sets and value-sets, so when you're forty or fifty or a hundred forty and you find something that doesn't work, you can still find all the threads and pull them.

But that's not real easy unless you know what your value-sets are, and most CITs don't. CITs have a trouble with not wanting to know that kind of thing. Because some of them are real eetee once you get to thinking about how they link. Especially about sex and ego-nets.

Justin says inflexibility is a trap and most Alpha types are inward-turned because they process so fast they're gone and thinking before a Gamma gets a sentence out. Then they get in the habit of thinking they thought of everything, but they don't remember everything stems from input. You may have a new idea, but it stems from input somebody gave you, and that could be wrong or your senses could have been lying to you. He says it can be an equipment-quality problem or a program-quality problem, but once an Alpha takes a falsehood for true, it's a personal problem.

We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.

Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.

Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.

"Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. “But to lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for quite a different schooling.” To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.

It was one of those moments — which sometimes occur only at the interval of years — when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.