Sermon quotes on
self-awareness
Aristotle
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Marcus Aurelius
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?
John Calvin
Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God’s majesty.
Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Anthony de Mello
Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one’s awareness of one’s ignorance.
One Minute Wisdom, Crown Publishing Group: New York. 2012.
Daniel Goleman
Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.
Ronald A. Heifetz
In the heat of leadership, with the adrenaline pumping, it is easy to convince yourself that you are not subject to the normal human frailties that can defeat ordinary mortals. You begin to act as if you are indestructible. But the intellectual, physical, and emotional challenges of leadership are fierce. So, in addition to getting on the being and assess the tolls those changes are taking. If you don’t, your seemingly indestructible self can self-destruct. This, by the way, is an ideal outcome for your foes-and even friends who oppose your initiative- because no one has to feel responsible for your downfall.
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
Carl Jung
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Gretchen Rubin
Self-awareness is a key to self-mastery.
Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives
Seneca the Younger
The worse a person is the less he feels it.
Socrates
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Ray C. Stedman
True prayer is an awareness of our helpless need and an acknowledgment of divine adequacy.
Walt Whitman
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Oscar Wilde
The final mystery is oneself.
Philip Yancey
The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.
Timothy Keller
If I am in denial about my own weaknesses and sin, there will be a concomitant blindness to the greatness and glory of God.
Francis De Sales
Several times during the day, but especially in the morning and evening, ask yourself for a moment if you have your soul in your hands or if some passion or fit of anxiety has robbed you of it…. If you have gone astray, quietly bring your soul back to the presence of God, subjecting all your affections and desires to the obedience and direction of His Divine Will.
Thomas Merton
Real self-conquest is the conquest of ourselves not by ourselves but by the Holy Spirit. Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves, we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.
Flannery O’Connor
To know oneself, is above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against the Truth, and not the other way around.
The Fiction Writer and His Country in The Complete Stories
Simon Baron-Cohen
Empathy often goes hand-in-hand with self-awareness. The people who are good at empathy are not only good at picking up on other people’s feelings, but they—they’re also good at reflecting on their own behavior.
“Does Empathy Explain Cruelty?,” Science Friday, September 30, 2011,
Augustine of Hippo
God, always the same, let me know myself, let me know Thee!
The Soliloquies of St. Augustine, book II, I, trans. Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, Little, Brown.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.”
John Calvin
The knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are bound together by a mutual tie.
Institutes of the Christian Religion, ch. 1, sec. 3.
Bernard of Clairvaux
Know yourself and you will have a wholesome fear of God; know him and you will also love him.
Sermon 37: Knowledge and Ignorance of God and of Self,” in Commentary on the Song of Songs, trans. Matthew Henry, Jürgen Beck.
H.F. Henrichs
Know Thyself-but don’t tell anyone.
Wayne Stiles
We think our problem is with God, but remember, God is perfect. Our problem is really with ourselves.
Carl Jung
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
Chaim Potok
“One learns of the pain of others by suffering own’s own pain, my father would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said.”
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
We spend the whole of our whole lives watching ourselves. But when a man becomes meek he has finished/
Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959–60), p.57.
Iris Murdoch
Love . . . is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Christopher Alexander
We are not always comfortable with the true self that lies deep within us.
Ruth Burrows
I was born into this world with a tortured sensitivity. For long I have puzzled over the causes of my psychological anguish.
Arthur W. Pink
The great mistake made by most of the Lord’s people is in hoping to discover in themselves that which is to be found in Christ alone.
The Doctrine of Sanctification (Swengel, PA: Bible Truth Depot, 1955), p.200
Dennis Linn
The examen makes us aware of moments that at first we might easily pass by as insignificant, moments that ultimately can give direction for our lives.
Thales of Miletus
The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.
John O’Donohue
When we devote no time to the inner life, we lose the habit of soul. If we fail to acquaint ourselves with soul, we will remain strangers in our own lives.
Parker J. Palmer
There is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is through.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 85.
Viktor Frankl
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston, MA: Beach Press, 2006), 112.
Carl Jung
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
C. Sreechinth, Musings of Carl Jung (Roosevelt, UT: UB Tech, 2018), 41.
John O’Donohue
When we devote no time to the inner life, we lose the habit of soul. If we fail to acquaint ourselves with soul, we will remain strangers in our own lives.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
To observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
William Ury
Psychologists have estimated that we have anywhere between twelve thousand and sixty thousand thoughts a day. The majority of those—as high as 80 percent—are thought to be negative: obsessing about mistakes, battling guilt, or thinking about inadequacies.
Getting to Yes with Yourself: How to Get What You Truly Want (HarperOne, 2016)
William Ury
Self-judgment may be the greatest barrier to self-understanding.
Getting to Yes with Yourself: How to Get What You Truly Want (HarperOne, 2016)
William Shakespeare
He hath ever but slenderly known himself.
King Lear
John Calvin
Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.
Thomas Merton
Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self … We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.
Thomas Merton
Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.
Jonathan Franzen
This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.
Freedom (Picador, 2014)
Corrie ten Boom
If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. If you look at God, you’ll be at rest.
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