self-awareness Quotes

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people's actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'

Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.