Self Consciousness Quotes

“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“Nobody can say anything about you. Whatsoever people say is about themselves. But you become very shaky, because you are still clinging to a false center. That false center depends on others, so you are always looking to what people are saying about you. And you are always following other people, you are always trying to satisfy them. You are always trying to be respectable, you are always trying to decorate your ego. This is suicidal. Rather than being disturbed by what others say, you should start looking inside yourself…

Whenever you are self-conscious you are simply showing that you are not conscious of the self at all. You don’t know who you are. If you had known, then there would have been no problem— then you are not seeking opinions. Then you are not worried what others say about you— it is irrelevant!

When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don’t know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.”
― Osho

“Self-consciousness kills communication.”
― Rick Steves

“Once you become self-conscious, there is no end to it; once you start to doubt, there is no room for anything else.”
― Mignon McLaughlin, The Complete Neurotic's Notebook

“I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.”
― David Brooks

“Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you're making.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“It is funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“Students of public speaking continually ask, "How can I overcome
self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an
audience?"
Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some
horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the
thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a
farmer's wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as
the train goes by?
How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars—graze him in a
back-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines or
automobiles, or drive or pasture him where he would frequently see
the machines?
Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness and
fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying. You can never attain
freedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise. A book may give
you excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in the
water, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even strangle
and be "half scared to death." There are a great many "wetless"
bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swim
in them. To plunge is the only way.”
― Dale Breckenridge Carnegie, The Art of Public Speaking

“Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will be lured out of the peace and stability of the being God gave us, and seek to live in a myth we have created for ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“And down I went to fetch my bride:
But, Alice, you were ill at ease;
This dress and that by turns you tried,
Too fearful that you should not please.
I loved you better for your fears,
I knew you could not look but well;
And dews, that would have fall'n in tears,
I kiss'd away before they fell.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Nothing is as irritating to a shy man as a confident girl.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet.”
― Sa'di

“Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Blacksmiths sometimes twist a rope tight around the nose of a horse, and by thus inflicting a little pain they distract his attention from the shoeing process. One way to get air out of a
glass is to pour in water. Be Absorbed by Your Subject”
― Dale Breckenridge Carnegie, The Art of Public Speaking

“The misfortune of solitary and timid people - who are timid from self-consciousness - is just that, though they have eyes and indeed open them wide, they see nothing, or see everything in a false light, as though through coloured spectacles.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Diary of a Superfluous Man

“I suddenly realize that I'm naked, which shouldn't bother me since it's the phone, but for some reason it does.

"How's it hanging?" Kyra asks and now I think I'm blushing. It's just an expression, but jeez!”
― Barry Lyga, The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl

“My waist is a 30. The jeans are a 28. When I fart, the Reeboks blow off.”
― Steve Kluger

“After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's...”
― Philip Pullman

“As he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature.”
― John Shelby Spong

“It was that restless feeling, already well established in me, of wanting actually to have the feelings with which I was credited.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“The Storm Stranger by Stewart Stafford

Were I to shed forty coats,
Or forty layers of this skin,
I'd stay an intruder in myself,
At a crossroads in a storm.

Stranger in my own country,
Pariah to everything beloved,
Organ rejection by my own body,
A lantern wanderer in limbo.

All foul, cast out by my lamp,
Saving those mistreating me,
Traversing sanity's outer rings,
I turn my collar up and trudge on.

© 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“There is more to stuttering than the mere repetition of words and phrases. And more to anxiety than just being nervous.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“Stuttering was such a huge blow to the psyche, such that you felt like you had won a trophy if you spoke and did not stutter.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“[...] this observing self often kills and withers anything that is under its scrutiny. The individual has now a persecuting observer in the very core of his being. It may be that the child becomes possessed by the alien and destructive presence of the observer who has turned bad in his absence, occupying the place of the observing self, of the boy himself outside the mirror. If this happens, he retains his awareness of himself as an object in the eyes of another by observing himself as the other: he lends the other his eyes in order that he may continue to be seen; he then becomes an object in his own eyes. But the part of himself who looks into him and sees him, has developed the persecutory features he has come to feel the real person outside him to have. [Self-consciousness, Freyd]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“The more conscious you are of your stutter, the more likely you are to stutter.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“This isn't about me and my anxieties. It's about everyone else who looks in the mirror and can't find beauty in their reflections, who, instead of embracing the things that make them different, hate themselves based on what society has told them they should look like.”
― Oksana Masters, The Hard Parts: A Memoir of Courage and Triumph

“By stating my dreams and listening to my intuition, I honor the Divine within me. This builds layer upon layer of confidence over the heaps of “not good enough” that have littered my subconscious for years. It is exceptionally difficult to move past the stories we tell ourselves.”
― Lavinia Busch, Mystic Cookie

“A self, created out of mathematics, engineering, material science and all the rest. No history — not that I’d want a false one. Nothing before me. Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.”
― Ian McEwan, Machines like Me