How Well Do You Understand Your ‘Self’?
Many times we use various ‘self’ words interchangeably – self awareness, self acceptance, self discovery, self confidence and so on. But each of them has a different meaning .
This article is a journey into understanding these different ‘self’ words through the thoughts of some of the best thinkers. To what purpose you may ask and as Aristotle has said thousands of years ago
Knowing your ‘self’ is the beginning of all wisdom.
Aristotle
Different ‘Self’ Words
This list of self words is not exhaustive.
Self awareness is the ‘conscious knowledge of one’s own character and feelings.‘
Self understanding is the ‘awareness of and ability to understand one’s own actions.‘
Self discovery refers to ‘the process of acquiring insight into one’s own character.‘
Self esteem refers to ‘confidence in one’s own worth or abilities; self-respect.‘
Introspection is ‘the examination or observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes.‘
Self confidence refer to ‘a feeling of trust in one’s abilities, qualities, and judgement.‘
Self improvement refers to ‘the improvement of one’s knowledge, status, or character by one’s own efforts.‘
Self acceptance refers to ‘an individual’s acceptance of all of his/her attributes, positive or negative.‘
Self actualization refers to ‘the realization or fulfilment of one’s talents and potentialities, especially considered as a drive or need present in everyone.‘
Self image refers to ‘the idea one has of one’s abilities, appearance, and personality.‘
Let’s being this journey into our ‘self.’
Self Awareness
Self awareness is the ‘conscious knowledge of one’s own character and feelings.‘
Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Gustav Jung
I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.
Hermann Hesse
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are.
All you notice is the person who doesn’t.
Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart
But you can’t get away from yourself. You can’t decide not to see yourself anymore. You can’t decide to turn off the noise in your head.
Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Part of the problem with the word ‘disabilities’ is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can’t feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren’t able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.
Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember
Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.
André Malraux
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?
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.
Dolly Parton
Self Understanding
Self understanding is the ‘awareness of and ability to understand one’s own actions.‘
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Gustav Jung
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
No tree tries to become a certain kind of tree. No flower tries to become a certain kind of flower. The tree and the flower open up to the sun and soak up water. Thus, they grow into themselves. No judgment. No expectations. No commentary. Your task is the same. If you can stop trying so hard to become who you think you should be, and instead commit to understanding and nourishing yourself, you will bloom into whatever kind of person you are.
Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself
I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.
Socrates
I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love.
Osho
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
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
Too often we confuse ‘discovering who we are’ with ‘discovering who we want to be.’ And if we commit to the former it will take care of the latter.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Self-understanding is a lifetime endeavour. It is not a weekend seminar. It does not come in capsule form.
Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself
Self Discovery
Self discovery refers to ‘the process of acquiring insight into one’s own character.‘
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Carl Gustav Jung
At the center of your being
Lao Tzu
you have the answer;
you know who you are
and you know what you want.
It takes courage…to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.
Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
Pico Iyer
Each man had only one genuine vocation – to find the way to himself….His task was to discover his own destiny – not an arbitrary one – and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.
Herman Hesse
Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Self Esteem
Self esteem refers to ‘confidence in one’s own worth or abilities; self-respect.‘
Everything that happens to you is a reflection of what you believe about yourself. We cannot outperform our level of self-esteem. We cannot draw to ourselves more than we think we are worth.
Iyanla Vanzant
The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.
M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles.
Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
Every woman that finally figured out her worth, has picked up her suitcases of pride and boarded a flight to freedom, which landed in the valley of change.
Shannon L. Alder
I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
Edward Everett Hale
Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.
Norman Vincent Peale
I used to be self conscious about my height, but then I thought, fuck that, I’m Harry Potter.
Daniel Radcliffe
Why should we worry about what others think of us, do we have more confidence in their opinions than we do our own?
Brigham Young
The better you feel about yourself, the less you feel the need to show off.
Robert Hand
Introspection Quotes
Introspection is ‘the examination or observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes.‘
The only journey is the one within.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Aldous Huxley
We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure–your perfection–is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
The deeper I go into myself the more I realize that I am my own enemy.
Floriano Martins
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
…live in the question.
A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, ‘Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?’ . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one’s time—the stuff of life.
Carl Sandburg
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?
Virginia Woolf
One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.
Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.
Carl Gustav Jung
Self Confidence
Self confidence refer to ‘a feeling of trust in one’s abilities, qualities, and judgement.‘
I have great faith in fools – self-confidence my friends will call it.
Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia
Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.
Rumi, The Essential Rumi
The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.
Coco Chanel, Believing in Ourselves: The Wisdom of Women
Believe you can and you’re halfway there.
Theodore Roosevelt
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust – First Part
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that…
I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.
John Lennon
You’re gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle.
David Nicholls, One Day
Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit
E.E. Cummings
I laugh at myself.
Madonna
I don’t take myself completely seriously.
I think that’s another quality that people have to hold on to… you have to laugh, especially at yourself.
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Robert Hughes
Self Improvement
Self improvement refers to ‘the improvement of one’s knowledge, status, or character by one’s own efforts.‘
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy
A strong man cannot help a weaker unless the weaker is willing to be helped, and even then the weak man must become strong of himself; he must, by his own efforts, develop the strength which he admires in another. None but himself can alter his condition.
James Allen, As a Man Thinketh
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
Ernest Hemingway
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
Albert Einstein
What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.
Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.
Jim Rohn
When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points.
Confucius
Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.
Jim Rohn
Self Acceptance
Self acceptance refers to ‘an individual’s acceptance of all of his/her attributes, positive or negative.‘
Because one believes in oneself, one doesn’t try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one doesn’t need others’ approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her.
Lao Tzu
You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.
Amy Bloom
Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.
Marilyn Monroe
The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.
Mark Twain
To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the “I”.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.
Buddha
Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.
Heath L. Buckmaster, Box of Hair: A Fairy Tale
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
Carl Gustav Jung
Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.
Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
how you love yourself is
Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
how you teach others
to love you
Self Actualization (aka Self Realization)
Self actualization refers to ‘the realization or fulfilment of one’s talents and potentialities, especially considered as a drive or need present in everyone.‘
Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.
Janis Joplin
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
Albert Camus
No matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you’ve come from, you can always change, become a better version of yourself.
Madonna
Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of that which you truly love.
Rumi
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point…
The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but … life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez
If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.
Katharine Hepburn
I exist as I am, that is enough.
Walt Whitman
Don’t go on discussing what a good person should be. Just be one.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.
Richard Wright, Native Son
Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life.
Shannon L. Alder
Love the earth and sun and animals,
Walt Whitman
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others…
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. Nobody else can.
Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
Your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world.
Ramana Maharshi
Self Image
Self image refers to ‘the idea one has of one’s abilities, appearance, and personality.‘
It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.
Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
It’s not what you say out of your mouth that determines your life, it’s what you whisper to yourself that has the most power!
Robert T. Kiyosaki
If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask… with nothing beneath it?
Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes
. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.
The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people’s perception of you rather than people’s perception of you.
Criss Jami, Killosophy
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
John Wooden
Thanks for reading this far. Hope you enjoyed it.
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Awesome explanation of self and how many times we use them interchangeably.
I exist as iam…i like that.