Self Reflection Quotes

We must look within ourselves, become responsible and provide fresh solutions if we ever want to do more than complain,or make excuses.

I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.

It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.

The quality of one's life is directly related to the quality of questions one asks oneself.

It is not vain glory for a man and his glass to confer in his own chamber.

Sometimes I think I was more in control of my life years and years ago, and yet one should make progress; one should learn more every year and become…well, if not happier, then calmer and more able to handle your problems. But I’m not. Sometimes I just seem to make more problems for myself. I do. It makes me feel I haven’t grown up as much as I should have by now.

The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime.

Death is not the opposite of life, it is a part of life. A part we've not yet explored and thus do not understand and it if only natural to fear what we do not understand. But with the right attitude we can make life beautiful. With this same attitude, can death not be the same? We almost always see only what's wrong with other people and not what's wrong with us.

Men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

it's a good idea to review past mistakes before committing new ones.

I don't have the delusion that I'm the best or have the right answer. Whenever someone is out there pissed at you or me, they don't even know you or I. What they are really pissed at is themselves. You might have total respect for them but they don't respect themselves.

I never go anywhere or do anything that transports me outside the boundaries of my mind.

My house is a bit like a teenager's bedroom. The kind of pictures you have hanging up on your wall say a lot about you. I've got ones of Evel Knievel, Elvis and Starsky and Hutch, signed by David Soul.

I make small mistakes every day. But major mistakes? It doesn't seem so. I've examined my service to the Tibetan people and to humanity, and I've done as much as I can in my life.

Successful leaders don't start out asking, 'What do I want to do?' They ask, 'What needs to be done?' Then they ask, 'Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?'

The sum of a man's problems come from his inability to be alone in a silent room.

If this is neither my own badness, nor an effect of my own badness, and the common weal is not injured, why am I troubled about it? And what is the harm to the common weal?

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.

I always say to myself, what is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment.

What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.

Oh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves.

What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.

Great players never look in the mirror and think I'm a great basketball player. You ask yourself, Am I the best player I can be?

[Relationships] do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you

Yet how proud we are,In daring to look down upon ourselves!

If you can't stand solitude, perhaps others find you boring as well.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

When you see anyone complaining of such and such a person's ill-nature and bad temper, know that the complainant is bad-tempered, forasmuch as he speaks ill of that bad-tempered person, because he alone is good-tempered who is quietly forbearing towards the bad-tempered and ill-natured.

The greatest source of unhappiness comes from inside.

Just think out for yourselves, if a man who was good yesterday has become bad after having come in contact with me, is he responsible that he has deteriorated or am I? ... It is well to take the blame sometimes.

The life of which meaning one never ponders is not worth living

You must constantly ask yourself these questions: Who am I around? What are they doing to me? What have they got me reading? What have they got me saying? Where do they have me going? What do they have me thinking? And most important, what do they have me becoming? Then ask yourself the big question: Is that okay? Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.

Clean your finger before you point at my spots.

If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)

It is not the failure of others to appreciate your abilities that should trouble you, but rather your failure to appreciate theirs.

If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for their not wanting to hear you.

I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.

Maybe at the same time as I'm more confident today, I'm also more humble.

If I have not been exposed and am not in any danger of pursuit. But I have been exposed, I am pursued - by myself! That is a pursuer that does not readily let go.

The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles me

Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?

... Allow yourself a space of quiet, wherein you can add to your knowledge of the Good and learn to curb your restlessness. Guard also against another kind of error: the folly of those who weary their days in much business, but lack any aim on which their whole effort, nay, their whole thought, is focused.

You can't grow and learn if your focus is on finding someone else to blame instead of looking at your own shortcomings.

Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.

The superior man will watch over himself when he is alone. He examines his heart that there may be nothing wrong there, and that he may have no cause of dissatisfaction with himself.

udge not, before you judge yourself.Judge not, if you're not ready for judgment.

If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear?

There are different kinds of humor, some is sarcastic, some introspective. Introspective fit my personality better.

I find good people good And I find bad people good If I am good enough.

Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof when your own doorstep is unclean.

Adversity always presents opportunities for introspection.

Each of us sees in others what we carry in our own hearts.

I am not a perfectionist, but still I seek perfection. I am not a great romantic, but yet I yearn 4 affection

His retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.

One mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself

We must look for our own blame to find our own personality.

If you have not taken the time to define what happiness means to you, what have your spent your whole life pursuing?

If you think the world is all wrong, remember that it contains people like you.

We are the mirror - As well as the face in it.

It may do good; pride hath no other glass To show itself but pride, for supple knees Feed arrogance and are the proud man's fees.