86 Self-Awareness Quotes

Self-awareness is the cornerstone of personal development, shaping how we perceive and interact with the world around us. It's a skill that allows us to recognize our thoughts, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses, ultimately guiding us toward more intentional and fulfilling lives. In the pursuit of greater self-awareness, quotes often serve as powerful reminders and sources of inspiration. Whether you're just beginning your journey of introspection or looking to deepen your understanding of yourself, these 86 curated quotes offer timeless wisdom and insights to help you navigate the complexities of self-discovery.

1. “As you become more clear about who you really are, you'll be better able to decide what is best for you - the first time around.” - Oprah Winfrey

2. “A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.” - David Sedaris

3. “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.” - G.I. Gurdjieff

4. “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” - Dolly Parton

5. “I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.” - Hermann Hesse

6. “I like that: a little pressure on the understood boundaries of yourself. Sounded like something out of a self-awareness class, probably with yoga. See what kind of a pretzel you can tie yourself into and press on the understood... I was raving, if only to myself.” - Robin McKinley

7. “Don't compromise yourself. You're all you've got.” - Janis Joplin

8. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - C.G. Jung

9. “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” - Carl R. Rogers

10. “Through others we become ourselves.” - Lev S. Vygotsky

11. “Don't try to tell me what I am because I know what I am not” - Dr. Amit Abraham

12. “All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes.“The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So, there's a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression.”“Yeah but Maestra—”“Don't interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in tern, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing'll go wrong and it'll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it's playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That's why, Switters my dearest, every time you've shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I've played my blues records really loud or read to you from The Horse’s Mouth. And that’s why when you’ve exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I’ve reminded you that you and me— you and I: excuse me—may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let’s not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It’s preventive medicine.”“But what about self-esteem?”“Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace—and maybe even glory.” - Tom Robbins

13. “I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.” - W.H. Auden

14. “Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.” - Fred Rogers

15. “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.” - Herman Hesse

16. “Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.” - Marcel Proust

17. “She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I am without adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world.” - Sharon Maas

18. “Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.” - Hugo Hamilton

19. “Jimmy put in a word and told them that if I made it, I wouldn't be able to live with myself without paying them back. That I'd sooner die than owe anyone money for helping me. Apparently Jimmy knew more about me at that point than I knew about myself.” - Craig Ferguson

20. “I've never had inner turmoil about all this. You find a lot of people these days who cannot stand to be alone. You could lock me up in solitary for weeks on end, and I'd keep myself amused.” - Keith Richards

21. “If I hadn't lost my hearing, I wouldn't be where I am now. It forced me to maximize my own potential. I have to be better than the average person to succeed.” - Lou Ferrigno

22. “Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.” - Anthony de Mello

23. “A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.” - Tobsha Learner

24. “We stay busy so we don't have to admit we don't have all the answers. After long enough with our constant distractions, we end our search for them. And God. Soon enough, we'll all come to realize we can't be God. We'll settle for telling ourselves we can. Or we'll just make one up.” - Brian Krans

25. “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” - Michel de Montaigne

26. “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” - Amit Ray

27. “All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own.” - Michel de Montaigne

28. “In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them?” - J.M. Coetzee

29. “Have love for your inner Self and everything else is done for you.” - Amit Ray

30. “It is when you lose sight of yourself, that you lose your way. To keep your truth in sight you must keep yourself in sight and the world to you should be a mirror to reflect to you your image; the world should be a mirror that you reflect upon.” - C. JoyBell C.

31. “There is something simply beautiful and simply innocent, in being human. It is just so innocent and beautiful. I love it.” - C. JoyBell C.

32. “The only person who can pull me down is myself, and I'm not going to let myself pull me down anymore.” - C. JoyBell C.

33. “If we cant laugh at ourselves, do we have the right to laugh at others?” - C.H. Hamel

34. “‎"The more we search for ourselves, the less likely we are to find ourselves; and the more we search for God, and to serve our fellow-men, the more profoundly will we become acquainted with ourselves, and the more inwardly assured. This is one of the great spiritual laws of life." (From a letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi to an individual believer, February 18, 1954)” - Shoghi Effendi

35. “The need to prove who you are will vanish once you know who you are.” - Danielle Pierre

36. “The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.” - Pema Chodron

37. “The gift of willingness is the only thing that stands between the quiet desperation of a disingenuous life and the actualization of unexpressed potential.” - Jim McDonald

38. “We judge others instantly by their clothes, their cars, their appearance, their race, their education, their social status. The list is endless. What gets me is that most people decide who another person is before they have even spoken to them. What's even worse is that these same people decide who someone else is, and don't even know who they are themselves.” - Ashly Lorenzana

39. “How shall I ever learn who I am when there is so much of me that belongs to someone else?” - Madeline Claire Franklin

40. “She had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in a mirror. She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy or th woman's dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seemed to evidence in her very posture.Then Ada took a step forward, and the other woman did too, and Ada realized that it was herself she was admiring, the mirror having caught the reflection of an opposite mirror on the wall behind her. The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to shift colors, bleaching mauve to rose. She climbed the steps to her room and prepared for bed, but she slept poorly that night, for the music went on until dawn. As she lay awake she thought how odd it had felt to win her own endorsement.” - Charles Frazier

41. “People are always doing things for my sake and strangely enough, I'm the one who suffers for it.” - Robert Masello

42. “Never try to do anything that is outside of who you are. A forced smile is a sign of what feels wrong in your heart, so recognize it when it happens. Living a lie will reduce you to one.” - Ashly Lorenzana

43. “Just take this as a warning. Know that there's always a price for not being yourself.” - Benilde Little

44. “Being spontaneous is being able to respond with confidence; calmly trusting that, whatever the outcome, you will have a positive if challenging experience that will lead to greater self-awareness and success.” - Sylvia Clare

45. “Try giving up all the thoughts that make you feel bad, or even just some of them, and see how doing that changes your life. You don't need negative thoughts. All they have ever given you was a false self that suffers. They are all lies.” - Gina Lake

46. “Once," Fran says, settling against the worktable, folding her arms, "I knew this kid who very bravely and bossily came out of the closet when she was only fourteen years old. She told me then that we can't choose who we love. We just love the people we love, no mattter what anyone else might want for us. Wasn't that you?” - Madeleine George

47. “Anyone who knows me, should learn to know me again;For I am like the Moon,you will see me with new face everyday.” - Rumi

48. “In yourself right now is all the place you've got.” - Flannery O'Connor

49. “Eu que me aguente comigo e com os comigos de mim.” - Fernando Pessoa

50. “By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.” - Lev Grossman

51. “Life is a valuable and unique opportunityto discover who you are.But it seems as soon as you nearanswering that age-old question,something unexpected always happensto alter your course.And who it is you thought you weresuddenly changes.Then comes the frustrating realizationthat no matter how long life endures,no matter how many experiencesare muddled through in this existence,you may never really be ableto answer the question....Who am I? Because the answer, like the seasons,constantly, subtly, inevitably changes.And who it is you are today,is not the same person you will be tomorrow.” - Richelle Goodrich

52. “A life without regret can be attained by full awareness of one's actions in their present moment.” - Michelle D. Rosado

53. “No: I shall not marry Samuel Fawthrop Wynne.""I ask why? I must have a reason. In all respects he is more than worthy of you."She stood on the hearth; she was pale as the white marble slab and cornice behind her; her eyes flashed large, dilated, unsmiling."And I ask in what sense that young man is worthy of me?” - Charlotte Brontë

54. “I don't want someone to believe my lies, I need someone to accept my truths.” - Kellie Elmore

55. “There's a mess inside you: You clean the outside.” - Anonymous

56. “When it comes to ourselves, we often have a blind spot. That is, we fail to see ourselves as others see us. We fail to recognize our most obvious traits: our strengths, weaknesses, mannerisms.” - Mark Link

57. “I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in the regard to all the for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority–like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner–it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time and practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.” - Albert Camus

58. “If you walk on sunlight, bathe in moonlight, breathe in a golden air and exhale a Midas' touch; mark my words, those who exist in the shadows will try to pull you into the darkness with them. The last thing that they want is for you to see the wonder of your life because they can't see theirs.” - C. JoyBell C.

59. “إن بيننا وبين الله رابطة لا تنفصم، فإذا نحن أخضعنا أنفسنا لإشرافه - سبحانه وتعالى - تحققت أمنياتنا وآمالنا كلها.” - William James

60. “The person with the least worry over the compromises he must make is, of course, the person who doesn't compromise.” - Mark Sundeen

61. “With every choice you create the life you’ll live; with every decision you design it.” - Mollie Marti

62. “Fue adondo a mi me perdieronquw logre por fin encontrarme?Was it where they lost methat I finally found myself?” - Pablo Neruda

63. “The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

64. “You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy.You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like.If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way.Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference.Your new self is not like that. Your new self is the Great Chicago Fire—overwhelming, overpowering, and destroying everything that isn’t necessary.” - Julien Smith

65. “Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?” - Marcus Aurelius

66. “The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can’t get out of within.” - Arthur Miller

67. “Sometimes it takes falling apart to see exactly how or what loosened the mortar. Sometimes we find we are responsible for the how & the what. As unpleasant as it is when it happens, one cannot help but appreciate these times for what you learn serves as a beacon. Of course this is only half the battle. Which means you're already half way there.” - Colleen Truscott Fry

68. “There are mighty few people who think what they think they think.” - Robert Henri

69. “It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control.” - Oprah Winfrey

70. “What people say and feel about you when you've left a room is precisely your job while you are in it.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

71. “In the end, the sum of my vices is all me.” - Melina Marchetta

72. “Hypocrisy is wretched because the hypocrite says with his tongue what is not in his heart. He wrongs his tongue and oppresses his heart. But if the heart is sound, the condition of the tongue follows suit. We are commanded to be upright in speech, which is a gauge of the heart's state.” - Hamza Yusuf

73. “Was this new self awareness a gift or a curse?” - D. Morgenstern

74. “Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.” - Don DeLillo

75. “Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.” - Jon Kabat-Zinn

76. “...to know an other's interior life you are his confessor or a writer - the one is admitted freely, the other intrudes by discerning of spirits ” - John Geddes

77. “The destination isn't in finding yourself. The destination is in the search.” - Thomas Warfield

78. “Enlightenment is not about cocooning one’s self, but about integrating more fully with both your self and life.” - jay woodman

79. “Peace of mind arrives the moment you come to peace with the contents of your mind.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

80. “Some of the things that beat the shit out of you . . . can beat the bullshit out of you too.” - Henry V. O'Neil

81. “I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love.” - Osho

82. “To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?” - Pascal Mercier

83. “To stand by yourself -- that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself.” - Pascal Mercier

84. “Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn't possibly be a bad thing.” - Lorrie Moore

85. “When we commit daily to offering our love, living in integrity, truth and values, we are more easily in tune to live our purpose …. We live our ethical life in all aspects; family, friends and business. Our spirit and body are always with us. In IHood, we choose to honor spiritual behavior over that of our body.” - Jill Little

86. “You're surrounded by people and voices and noises, but there you are, alone and trembling inside. And you want to be invisible. (thinking) Please, don't notice me.” - Kellie Elmore