Seeing Ourselves Quotes

#1. We have to care what someone thinks of us. We are incapable of seeing ourselves [sometimes].

Darnell Lamont Walker

#2. Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them.

Franklin P. Adams

#3. It is in seeing ourselves whole that we can begin to see ways of working out our differences, of understanding our similarities and of finally forming the cohesive nation that can one day experience the 'domestic tranquility' so hoped for by the framers of the Constitution.

Robert C. Maynard

#4. There is no moral reason for humanity to continue, if its ends are limited to itself. And this is how we must stop seeing ourselves. This is why we destroy each other. If we disregard the life around us, why should we not be equally disregarded?

Paul Xylinides

#5. On a national level there is a tendency to portray Latino culture as a monolithic entity, which is a really inaccurate way of seeing ourselves. There is as much diversity and uniqueness within the Latino culture as there is in any other kind of American culture.

Benjamin Bratt

#6. The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

June Singer

#7. It is seeing ourselves in others that often prompts the remark, 'There's something about that person I don't trust.

Robert Breault

#8. Instead of seeing ourselves as people trying to connect with people, let's see the church as people trying to connect with God and help others do the same.

James MacDonald

#9. I think wearing less makeup can seem a bit scary for some women because we get so used to seeing ourselves look a certain way.

Louise Nurding

#10. The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want to be.

Bell Hooks

#11. I think our music is more about seeing ourselves in each other and trying to find a more humanistic viewpoint for the world.

Conor Oberst

#12. Burning fossil fuels has given us the gift of seeing ourselves in new ways. But that very gift now enables us to see we've got to change our ways.

Sylvia Earle

#13. In our daily lives, we see ourselves often in very reductive ways. I want to explore motion, change and flux, whether we are looking in the mirror or seeing ourselves in our surroundings. The singular view of self contradicts the act of living.

Doug Aitken

#14. Maybe life isn't about seeing ourselves. Maybe it's about letting other people see us.

Rebekah Crane

#15. I think we are only afraid of ourselves," the doctor said slowly.
"No," Luke said. "Of seeing ourselves clearly and without disguise.

Shirley Jackson

#16. We spend our lives getting caught up in all the wrong things
led astray by our minds, our egos, seeing ourselves as separate from each other, rather than listening to the truth that lies within our own hearts, the truth that we are all connected, we are all in it together.

Alyson Noel

#17. The fear of seeing ourselves as we are ensures we will never see the end of our fears.

Guy Finley

#18. Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.

Nathan Hill

#19. By seeing ourselves honestly, we have the capacity to understand others more deeply.

Helen LaKelly Hunt

#20. My purpose is to help people look at themselves and begin to shift their concepts. Remember, we are not our country, our race, or religion. We are eternal spirits. Seeing ourselves as spiritual beings without label is a way to transform the world and reach a sacred place for all of humanity.

Wayne Dyer

#21. Most of us want to have our minds continually occupied so that we are prevented from seeing ourselves as we actually are. We are afraid to be empty. We are afraid to look at our fears.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#22. We read because they teach us about people, we can see ourselves in them,in their problems.And by seeing ourselves in them, we clarify ourselves, we explain ourselves to ourselves, so we can live with ourselves ...

F. Sionil Jose

#23. Seeing ourselves through the eyes of grace frees us to be for others all we need to be.

Michael Card

#24. Maybe it's an issue of being unable or unwilling to realize that we can actually impact things sufficiently to change things, rather than seeing ourselves as being exiled to some distant side line of life where we can do nothing more than sheepishly root for a life that's far too far away to touch.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#25. The most serious thing, and the strangest, is that we are afraid to the point of panic, not so much of seeing ourselves as of being seen by ourselves. This is our root absurdity. What is behind this great fear?

Rene Daumal

#26. You're growing up. Maybe that's it," he said softly. "Sometimes I think the world tests us most sharply then, and we turn inward and watch ourselves with horror. But that's not the worst. We think everybody is seeing into us. Then dirt is very dirty and purity is shining white.

John Steinbeck

#27. We break off obsession by laughing at ourselves, by learning to be funny, by just seeing the joy in life and by having a terrific love for this world.

Frederick Lenz

#28. I think we should try to be responsible and educate ourselves. I'm simply doing that and traveling, learning first hand, and seeing first hand what's going on.

Angelina Jolie

#29. We must be able to look under the surface rather than over-analyze it and delude ourselves into thinking we're seeing beneath it.

Brianna Wiest

#30. What rivets me to history is seeing / acts of survival turned / to rituals of self-hatred. This / is colonization. Unborn sisters, / look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves, / see us not one-dimensional but with / the past as your steadying and corrective lens.

Adrienne Rich

#31. How many times in your life has anything you forced to happen worked out for you? Have we failed? Has the universe failed us? The universe cannot fail us. We fail ourselves by not seeing the bigger picture.

Ruben Papian

#32. what we see clearest in others is what we most avoid seeing in ourselves. Elise

Richard Paul Evans

#33. If we can change ourselves, we can change the world. We're not the victims of the world we see, we're the victims of the way we see the world. This is the essence of Compassionate Listening: seeing the person next to you as a part of yourself.

Dennis Kucinich

#34. I'm saying that sometimes we don't want to see the ugliness in others because it means seeing what's ugly in ourselves.

Brian F. Walker

#35. Meditation is not to escape from society, but to come back to ourselves and see what is going on. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. With mindfulness, we know what to do and what not to do to help.

Nhat Hanh

#36. When we latch on to an identity, it's easy to take offence. But we offend ourselves. We lock ourselves into very rigid ways of seeing and thinking and reacting.

Steve Hagen

#37. Our job as the game creators or developers - the programmers, artists, and whatnot - is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user's shoes. We try to see what they're seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.

Shigeru Miyamoto

#38. Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

Ted Chiang

#39. We would understand much more about life's complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time
on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.

Jose Saramago

#40. It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations
Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#41. My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don't need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let's play him more.

Jacques Barzun

#42. Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what's happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what's happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.

Sharon Salzberg

#43. It doesn't really matter how much of the rules or the dogma we accepted and lived by if we're not really living by the fundamental creed of the Catholic Church, which is service to others and finding God in ourselves and then seeing God in everyone - including our enemies.

Martin Sheen

#44. We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.

Eric Hoffer

#45. Remember our heritage is our power; we can know ourselves and our capacities by seeing that other women have been strong.

Judy Chicago

#46. What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering, handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream...

Ray Bradbury

#47. Sometimes we do that to ourselves
we pit our desires against one another. We insist unnecessarily on seeing one aspect of our personality as being at odds with the rest of ourselves.

Julia Serano

#48. TAKE A minute to list the top five or six things you feel called and committed to in this season of life. Seeing them written on paper, in order, can help us orient ourselves and make decisions that spring from those priorities.

Shauna Niequist

#49. That's how it always is," Koznyshev interrupted him. "We Russians are always like that. Perhaps it's one of our good national characteristics. I mean this faculty of seeing our own shortcomings. But we overdo it. We comfort ourselves with ironic remarks which are always on the tip of the tongue.

Leo Tolstoy

#50. When we look at other people comparatively and competitively, we're not seeing them as our brothers and sisters. We're not loving them more than we love ourselves, and we we're definitely not seeing them as God sees them.

Craig Groeschel

#51. Call it what you will, it's about getting up off your chair, going where the action is, and seeing things firsthand. Because when we see things for ourselves, with our own two eyes, it changes us.

David Sturt

#52. I still believe that everyone is beautiful in some way and by seeing the beauty in others we make ourselves more beautiful.

Carole King

#53. What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.

Douglas Adams

#54. To know that He has risen, and to have fellowship with Him as such - communing with the risen Saviour by possessing a risen life - seeing Him leave the tomb by leaving the tomb of worldliness ourselves, this is even still more precious.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#55. We are exceptionally good at seeing the faults in others and exceptionally adept at ignoring the faults in ourselves.

Robert Barron

#56. If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation.

Sharon Salzberg

#57. How do we break this cycle of adding to the unconsciousness on the planet? The answer lies in seeing that our true nature consists ONLY of love, and so that is ALL we have to give [and see] when we know ourselves as that ...

Mike Jeffries

#58. The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming.

Bell Hooks

#59. Seeing what is wrong and how it could be made right propels us into action, but in that action we often leave other people behind and don't give ourselves enough time to be present, or to stop and reflect. Leaders have to get comfortable with pausing in that uncomfortable gap.

Jennifer Lawrence

#60. We need to regularly stop and take stock; to sit down and determine within ourselves which things are worth valuing and which things are not; which risks are worth the cost and which are not. Even the most confusing or hurtful aspects of life can be made more tolerable by clear seeing and by choice.

Epictetus

#61. Progress and healing involves seeing every person as not so different from ourselves.

Bryant H. McGill

#62. When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf?

Jose Saramago

#63. Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.

Marcel Proust

#64. [M]an [has] the power of abstraction from himself[.]

Ludwig Feuerbach

#65. When I read Thirteen Days I was moved by it. It was just a great time for the world, in terms of looking back in history and seeing how we got ourselves into trouble and how we got ourselves out of trouble.

Kevin Costner

#66. How then can we change being? By applying the knowledge of the Work through self-observation to ourselves. And remember that you do not change by being told what to do. You only change through seeing what you have to do when you realize what your being is like.

Maurice Nicoll

#67. Seeing and admitting the truth about ourselves, about our role in creating our own problems, and about how we relate to others is vital for healing.

Caroline Myss

#68. By art alone we can get out of ourselves, find out what another person sees of this universe which is not the same as ours ... Thanks to art, instead of seeing only one world, we see it multiplied, and we have as many different worlds at our disposition as there are original artists.

Marcel Proust

#69. We had convinced ourselves that conditions wouldn't be right for seeing spokes on the lit side of the rings until about 2007, ... But this finding seems to be telling us that conditions on the dark side of the rings are almost as good right now for seeing spokes.

Carolyn Porco

#70. And seeing that face, touching it and loving it in ourselves and others, is the experience of God. It is our divine humanness. It is the high we all seek.

Marianne Williamson

#71. I think a lot of people are drawn to seeing people that want to be better. We see it in ourselves.

Zach Braff

#72. Often what prevents us from seeing beauty in the outside world is the fact that we fail to see beauty in ourselves and other people. Forgiveness is the key that can unlock this door for us.

Anthony J. Ciorra

#73. How frustrating to think you can be lost to yourself. And yet how often it is that a stranger stares back at you from the mirror. Maybe in truth we never see ourselves as clearly as the thousands of eyes that daily take us in.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#74. And here we must narrowly watch ourselves, seeing that banquets can scarcely be celebrated blamelessly, for almost always luxury accompanies feasting; and when the body is swallowed up in the delight of refreshing itself, the heart relaxes to empty joys.

Pope Gregory I

#75. Fits of anger, vexation,and bitterness against ourselves tend to pride and they spring from no other source than self-love, which is disturbed and upset at seeing that it is imperfect.

Francis De Sales

#76. For as we forgive, we are forgiven; as we condemn others, we are ourselves condemned. Thus in patience condemn not, neither find fault; not condoning, not agreeing, but let thine own life so shine that others, seeing thy patience, knowing thy understanding, comprehending thy peace, may take hope.

Edgar Cayce

#77. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves

John Green

#78. Addictions are strategies we use to keep the truth from ourselves by blinding us from seeing what's true about us.

Michael John Cusick

#79. We never look beyond our assumptions and what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves.

Muriel Barbery

#80. Awakening is not a process of building ourselves up but a process of letting go. It's a process of relaxing in the middle - the paradoxical, ambiguous middle, full of potential, full of new ways of thinking and seeing - with absolutely no money-back guarantee of what will happen next.

Pema Chodron

#81. There is so much baggage we burden ourselves with over the years that keeps us from seeing things the way they are. Some baggage we carry with us for a single thought, some for years, and some for lifetimes. But there isn't one piece that isn't our own creation.

Bill Porter

#82. New situations inspire new thoughts. Here is the benefit of travelling, much more than in mere sight-seeing. We lose ourselves in the streets of our own city, and go abroad to find ourselves.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#83. When we latch on to an identity, it is easy to take offense. But we offend ourselves. We lock ourselves into very rigid ways of seeing and thinking and feeling and reacting. It doesn't have to be this way. The fact is, I'm not anything in particular. Nor are you. Nor is anyone.

Steve Hagen

#84. God is the reason expressing, affirming itself as the highest existence. To the imagination, the reason is the revelation of God; but to the reason, God is the revelation of the reason[.]

Ludwig Feuerbach

#85. The wildest thing about holding my brother's memories inside me? Seeing myself through his eyes, hearing myself with his ears, sailing the Cassiopeian sea in three dimensions, the way we experience practically everything except the one thing we're supposed to understand the best: ourselves.

Rick Yancey

#86. I hope some future day will bring me the happiness of seeing my family again collected under our own roof, happy in ourselves and blessed in each other.

Abigail Adams

#87. When we are self-aware, we are able to reach beyond ourselves and objectively assess others ... allowing us to meet them where they are at, seeing into their needs and struggles, so we can understand the way they experience life, even if it is vastly different from the way we experience, our own.

Jaeda DeWalt

#88. We as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women

Naomi Wolf

#89. Often what we see clearest in others is what we most avoid seeing in ourselves.

Richard Paul Evans

#90. There is a quality of murky grandeur we give ourselves in having our own feelings, recoiling, separate from other things ... To feel that we can care for ourselves without seeing our feelings as objects, and liking them as objects, is to be wrong about our care for ourselves.

Eli Siegel