Self Examination Quotes

“A true genius admits that he/she knows nothing.”
― Albert Einstein

“For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and to provide for it.”
― Patrick Henry

“A pure heart does not demean the spirit of an individual, it, instead, compels the individual to examine his spirit.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.”
― Zeena Schreck

“For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching has become a regular habit, until he is able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong. – Bill W.”
― Bill W.

“The only way to make a spoilt machine work again is to break it down, work on its inner system and fix it again. Screw out the bolts of your life, examine and work on yourself, fix your life again and get going.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as what you're visiting.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“There are Tantrics who deliberately seek to do more active forms of renunciation, so transgression of social norms and breaking of taboo, and breaking of social taboos especially, is a form of renunciation.”
― Zeena Schreck

“Wasn't this rugged business of taking your life apart, looking at all of it and admitting and remembering and reminding yourself of all the bad - wasn't the big result of it your getting to be honest?

"Exactly that," said Ferguson.”
― Paul de Kruif, A Man Against Insanity: The Birth of Drug Therapy in a Northern Michigan Asylum

“This scroll is my personal obituary, a journal that documents my time toiling on this rocky orb. I labored to say who I am, how I lived, and frame the troubling questions regarding what I seek. I wrote in order to penetrate illusions, address the tedium of existence, gain insight into my true nature, and give conscious shape to the vestiges of a tormented man. I used this written journey of the mind to explore all prior reference points of self-identity and toiled to meld the disharmonious components of a fragmented psyche into a wholesome human being. Writing was a tool employed to use conscious suffering mercilessly to suppress a caustic ego and resurrect a more inclusive, synthetic, and unitive consciousness that no longer wants for anything or suffers from the travails of life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Racist” and “antiracist” are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other. We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an antiracist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Never underestimate your ability to underestimate yourself.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“A person of average intelligence is capable of learning useful life lessons through the act of self-examination.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“I write not to justify a portfolio of personal failures. I do not seek to moralize or cast blame for my follies and catastrophes upon other people. I do not seek to malign other persons when documenting a series of unpleasant personal encounters in an unyielding society. I desire to overcome myself. I write in an attempt to alter my worldview, calm the soul, find serenity, extinguish hatred, and discover those elementary feelings of wellbeing which subsist permanently in humankind, which are independent of culture, race, class, and time. I write in an effort to discover the moral sublimity underlying existence. I write in order to understand myself and to transfigure myself. Writing is my attempt to rise beyond the facileness of my prior existence. I write in an effort to transcend the prodigious pain of living a profligate life. I write in an attempt to transmute my personage from that of an ordinary toad who despises all of his visible warts. I write in an attempt to decipher how to overcome a penchant for personal aggressiveness and brutality and become kind and gentle. I write in an attempt to discover how I can become a wise person who courageously faces the obstacles of life and exhibits grace and poise in the horror of his blackest days. I write to create an artifact of an intact and pacific persona.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Each day I attempt to establish a conjugated ring of reasons to rise tomorrow. Each day I seek to engage in some audible act of faith reaffirming a spiritual warrior’s commitment to living. Each day when engaged in investigative writing, I seek to perform some testimonial act that will lead me towards achieving desirable, premeditated change. Each day that I dabble with writing a deliberative memoir requires a scathing examination of how I lived. It also demands scrupulous assessment of how I want to live the remainder of an unspooling life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We learn about ourselves by taking one footstep at a time along a road of discovery. Greek philosopher Heraclitus who lived around 500 BCE proffered cogent advice about how to acquire wisdom and achieve a proper perspective on all worldly events. ‘Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for truth, be ready for the unexpected. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one.’ This script tells of one man’s journeying a full circle in an effort to become one with all that exists.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Well, didn't you look sharp with your boots when you met me on the path?
From two-tone to downtown Beirut but only halfway back
Stealing bits of wisdom from the shelf
Turned prisons into prisms of the self
And what do they know about the springtime or me and you?
Born in the midst of the long hot summer we lived through
Did they see you run for every rhyme?
Did we run for running out of time?
When even heroes have to die
No one lives forever, love, no one's wise to try
We're adding our own wisdom to the shelf
Stealing bits of paper, we had help
But working away, did we miss the passing of the time?
In your own flame you can wither though your passions still outshine
Did you read the writing on the wall?
Prophesying doom upon us all
But even heroes have to die
No one lives forever, love, no one's wise to try
But hidden in the writing on the wall
Many are the beauties of the fall”
― Ted Leo

“They will not even dare take a minute and stand in front of a mirror to examine their faces lest they suddenly realize how defeated, how duped they have been all these years. There is something about staring at ourselves in the mirror that makes us question our very existence, and whether we are the kind of people that we wanted to be, a question that so many people avoid confronting.”
― Louis Yako

“Unable to face the paltriness of our lives, it is simpler to bask in a fleeting pleasure dome than labor endlessly to create worthy secular testimonies demonstrating that a life well lived does in fact have intrinsic value. Regardless of what providence has in store, dense men such as me fritter away their lives hoping to capture eroticism’s delights. It is less taxing to rummage through the garbage dump picking amidst the trash heap of life’s inglorious scandals than it is to delve into penetrating our defensive shells.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“I seek to examine all factoids that led to personal despair by undertaking an Odyssey-like journey of the mind. I shall attempt to draw from the knowledge gleaned from all sources, and strictly examine crucial events of personal history not to rediscover what I already know, but to examine reminiscent occurrences under a new light of heightened consciousness, and in doing so rewrite my history and pen an enlightened future. Perhaps with resolute effort, I can recast a benighted nightmare into a bounteous prospect for joyful and a meaningful existence. I must undertake an arduous cognitive journey to discover what elusive substance provides purposefulness to living.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing--myself.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Plus je me suis examiné, plus j'ai vue que je n'étais propre qu'à être roi.”
― Armand De Madaillan De Lesparre Lassay

“Gradually, as my bruised forehead healed, and as I absorbed my own words, I developed a growing sympathy for the man in these pages, the intelligence operative of doubtful intelligence. Was he a fool or too smart for his own good? Had he chosen the right side or the wrong side of history? And were not these the questions we should all ask ourselves? Or was it only me and myself who should be so concerned?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“As I have become more comfortable with extending grace towards myself it has been so much easier to extend grace to others. My assessment is that as I study and evaluate me and who I am, and am becoming, it is easier to accept others for who they are and are becoming.”
― Sandra C Bibb

“A man who looks too deeply inside himself is apt to see nothing and so despair.”
― T.M Cicinski, The Mind Is Its Own Place

“Gradually, through honest and courageous self-examination, correction and repentance, the blessed consequence is that our mortal intentions become increasingly more congruent with our core spirit intentions. This greater spiritual integrity aligns us ever more closely with Deity and the Universe.”
― Eric Bjarnson Ph.D., Some Universals, Vol. 2: Intention and Attention

“Self-examination is a disease.”
― Jay Sreekumar

“The real change starts with the individual, because each person's action either heals the world, or further plunges it downhill.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Burn Like Fire

“Do we ever really know what we will do in any situation until the situation presents itself?”
― Adebayo Ayobami

“Challenge reminds us that the quest for exemplary leadership is first an inner quest to discover who you are, and it's through self-examination that you find the awareness to lead.”
― Kouzes/Posner, Leadership Challenge 4th E