Self Understanding Quotes

Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish. Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I'm still learning.

IRVIN D.YALOM

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The thing that matters most is what matters to you, not anybody else.

Fennel Hudson

Greater in battlethan the man who would conquera thousand-thousand men,is he who would conquerjust one —himself.Better to conquer yourselfthan others.When you've trained yourself,living in constant self-control,neither a deva nor gandhabba,nor a Mara banded with Brahmas,could turn that triumphback into defeat.

Gautama Buddha

Wisdom along with maturity is self understanding and defining one's character through reasoning in a circumstance.

Unarine Ramaru

It is not until you learn to look at yourself, through the truth of who you are, that you can look at someone else.

Vironika Tugaleva

Once I finally understand the immensity of my own impoverishment, I am finally in a position to see the enormity of God’s majesty.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Richard Wright and his Negro intellectual colleagues never realized the plain truth that no one in the United States understood the revolutionary potential of the Negro better than the Negro's white radical allies. They understood it instinctively, and revolutionary theory had little to do with it. What Wright could not see was that what the Negro's allies feared most of all was that this sleeping, dream-walking black giant might wake up and direct the revolution all by himself, relegating his white allies to a humiliating second-class status. The negro's allies were not about to tell the Negro anything that might place him on the path to greater power and independence in the revolutionary movement than they themselves had. The rules of the power game meant that unless the American Negro taught himself the profound implications of his own revolutionary significance in America, it would never be taught to him by anybody else. Unless the Negro intellectuals understood that in pursuit of this self-understanding, they would have to make their own rules, by and for themselves, nationalism would forever remain--as it was for Wright-- "a bewildering and vexing question.

Harold Cruse

To ask who we are represents a primary reflex in human consciousness. Every person seeks to understand him or herself and reach a verifiable and cohesive image of his or her own identity.

Kilroy J. Oldster

A true understand of oneself is vital. Writing enables us to act as a sun in our own universe, to become the perfect overseer, and observe the innumerable changes in the seasons of life. Writing is an intense form of self-exploration, and through thoughtful encounters with the humble self, we grow, and that growth diminishes unhappiness and creates joy.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I regret it when I suppress my feelings too long and they burst forth in ways that are distorted or attacking or hurtful.

Carl R. Rogers

Self-questioning and a desire to gain self-understanding is the fêted act of humankind.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Narrative writing represents a personal attempt to quantify and understand the psychological singularities behind the author’s personality traits as delineated by winnowed list of formative life experiences.

Kilroy J. Oldster

A person can only see their shadow if they awaken their eclectic soul. Self-understanding commences by admitting to the shadowy presence of the primordial unconsciousness. The unconscious mind is a magical concoction of logical and irrational thoughts and feelings.

Kilroy J. Oldster

We employ our personality, what we know, think, and believe, in order to interpret the world, making self-understanding a critical act because it establishes the baseline for our philosophical and intellectual approach towards life.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.

Kilroy J. Oldster

A positive response to any situation is the key to the feeling of well-being. The more we practice it the easier it becomes. Gradually all automatic reactions are being replaced by a conscious response. When we know we are self-empowered, we take responsibility for our emotions. It is knowing that we have the ability to respond in a way we prefer.

Raphael Zernoff

Suffering is an essential component of life. No person escapes suffering, which is indivisible from life itself. Suffering is what places in in contact with the self; it is what allows us to understand the spiritual nature behind our existence.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Time alone helps us to remember who we are.

Fennel Hudson

I take my cues from the world around me and carefully paint a self-portrait that the world can’t help but accept. However, I would be much wiser to put down all such artistic notions and hold up the portrait of me painted by God simply because that is a picture at which the world can’t help but marvel.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

I wanted, for so long, for someone to understand me better than I understood myself, to take control of me, to save me, to make it all better. I thought that the hardest part of a loving, mutually healing relationship would be showing my vulnerable, raw spots to a person, even though I'd been hurt so many times before. This has not been the hardest part. The actual hardest part has been realizing that no one, no matter how compassionate and kind they are, will say the perfect things always. Myself included. The hardest part has been learning to communicate what I need, to hear what others need, to tell others how to tell me what they need. Intimacy takes a lot of communication. We all have triggers. I don't know your triggers and you don't know mine. No matter how much I love or trust you, you cannot possibly know exactly the words I need to hear, the words I don't want to hear, and the way I like to be touched. And how strange that we expect these things of each other. How strange, and self-sabotaging, that we refuse to get into relationships and friendships with people unless they treat us in just that perfect way. We've been raised to want fairy tales. We've been raised to wait for flawless saviors to rescue us. But the savior isn't flawless and the savior is not coming. The savior is you. The savior is still learning. The savior is never done learning. The savior is a human being. Forget perfect. Forget flawless. And start speaking your truth. Start speaking what you want and how you want it. And start asking and listening, really listening, to what the people around you say. Maybe, then, we will stop abandoning and hurting each other. Maybe, then, there's hope for us.

Vironika Tugaleva

Unless we understand how the twists and turns of life operate to make us, we cannot comprehend who and what we are. Without self-awareness, we are blind to registering the intertexture of other people’s inner life. Gracefully enduring personal hardships expands our minds to extend sympathy and empathy for other people. By casting our personal life experiences into a supple storytelling casing, we create the translucent membrane that quarters the fusion of our flesh, nerves, blood, and bones. Self-understanding is an essential step in loving the entire world.

Kilroy J. Oldster

The man that wars with and judges others is eternally lost. The man that wars with and judges himself is eternally found.

Jason Versey

Today I began to criticise myself and look at myself with a judgmental eye... but then instead of going all out in that direction, I stopped and I began to understand me. And then I began to be patient with me. And then I began to feel a softness in the middle of my chest. So then I concluded that I can understand and be patient with me, just like how I am always understanding and being patient with everyone else. Why? Because I deserve that, and more.

C. JoyBell C.

What I do is the truest mirror of who I am.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

When we choose to operate on the frequency of compassion and kindness, we create, and reinforce our own reality, as filled with compassion and kindness. I refer here to the idea of unconditional compassion and kindness. It means that we can choose to react to any situation, as negative as it may seem to be, with kindness and understanding. Whenever someone chooses to be rude to us, there is no need for us to respond with rudeness. A moment of self-reflection can remind us that fire fought with fire only increases the heat. The more often we practice our conscious positive response, to any situation, our automatic negative reactions are gradually being replaced with a conscious decision to act in the most loving way we can conceive at the moment.

Raphael Zernoff

The most profound personal growth does not happen while reading a book or meditating. It happens in the throes of conflict, when you are angry, afraid, frustrated. It happens when you are doing the same old thing and you suddenly realize that you have a choice.

Vironika Tugaleva

There is a difference between working hard to create a life that truly serves you and working hard to create a life that you’ve been told you should want.

Vironika Tugaleva

To fall down is to face the weakness of my humanity, test the mettle of my character, and push the limits of my strength. Therefore, falling down will tell me who I am far more clearly than most things I might learn when I’m standing up.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

When people of different religions or countries harm people as a means to create peace, it’s out of the compulsion to make all colors the same. This is also why people think that war is a logical avenue towards creating peace. People who do not have or know inner peace perpetuate these shards of illusions. Thus, they are projecting their fragmented concepts of peace out onto the world.

Alaric Hutchinson

Self-knowledge, a spiritual metamorphosis, precedes understanding other people and comprehending the beauty of being part of the spontaneous interplay of the natural world.

Kilroy J. Oldster

A person does not reach the pinnacle of self-realization without relentlessly exploring the parameters of the self, exhausting their psychic energy coming to know oneself. Without society to rebel against and to sail away from, there would be no advances in civilization; there would be no need for healers and mystics, priests and artist, or shaman and writers. It is our curiosity and refusal to be satisfied with the status quo that compels us to challenge ourselves to learn and continue to grow. We only establish inner peace of mind with acceptance of the world, with the recognition of our connection to the entirety of the universe, and understanding that chaos and change are inevitable. We must also love because without love there are no acts of creation. Without love, humankind is a spasmodic pool of brutality and suffering. Love is a balm. It cures human aches and pains; it unites couples, families, and cultures. Love is a creative force, without love there is no art or religion. Art expresses thought and feelings, an articulation of adore and reverence.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking ‘muck’ across the floor of fact.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

If you do not respect your own wishes, no one else will. You will simply attract people who disrespect you as much as you do.

Vironika Tugaleva

When you love people, you are curious about who they are, what they think, and how they feel. You watch them closely, wondering about their experience and what you can do to make it more enjoyable. You feel compassion for their pain and seek to make it more bearable. You are eager to learn the unique language of their existence. You want to under-stand them, inspire them, heal them. What if you could look at yourself this way?

Vironika Tugaleva

You may never live long enough to discover who you are, but by the time you reach middle age you will hopefully realize who you are not.

James Rozoff

The testimony of the greatest humans who have ever lived is that the way to make the most of ourselves is by transcending ourselves. We must learn to move beyond self-centeredness to make room within ourselves for others. When you transcend yourself, the fact will be confirmed by the quality of your life. We will attain – even if only momentarily – a transparency and a radiance of being which results from living both within and beyond yourself. This is the promise and the excitement of self-understanding.

Don Richard Riso

Self Understanding Quotes

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