Self-Awareness and Self-Acceptance: Quotations for Reflection and Discussion
published January 16, 2024
Photo by Antoni Shkraba from Pexels
by Catharine Hannay, founder of MindfulTeachers.org
Here are a variety of perspectives on self-knowledge, self-acceptance, learning from mistakes, and mindful nonconformity.
Teachers, I don't necessarily recommend giving this whole long list to your students. I like to provide a lot of options so you can choose what's most appropriate for your particular context.
Who Am I?
Self-Knowledge and Personal Identity
“I am not what happened to me; I am who I choose to become.”
Carl Jung
“At the center of your being you have the answer;
you know who you are and you know what you want.”
Lao Tzu
“Many people confuse their activities with themselves, believing them to be the same. But this is not so. The doer is one thing and his deeds are another.”
The Cloud of Unknowing (from chapter 14)
“We are not who we might have been or who we would like to be. We are exactly who we are.”
Eric Maisel, Why Smart People Hurt, p. 69
“There should be another form of the word I to signify how different we used to be, because when I look back at my younger self […] I can’t believe she and I are the same person.”
Susie Arnett, More Magazine July/Aug 2015
“I’ve lived long enough to feel a stranger to myself—no one more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am.”
Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business
“Everything I ever thought about myself, who I was, what I am, was a lie. Or sort of. You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that feels.”
Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Stardust
“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself that I hardly existed. I had to go out in the world and see it and hear it and react to it before I knew at all who I was, what I was, and what I wanted to be.”
Mary Oliver, from A Sense of Wonder, ed. Brian Doyle
The holy fool Nasrudin arrives at the bank:
“The bank teller asks him if he can identify himself. He pulls out a mirror and says, ‘Yep. That’s me.’”
Ram Dass, Polishing the Mirror
Self-Acceptance
“There’s no ‘should’ or ‘should not’ when it comes to having feelings. They’re part of who we are and their origins are beyond our control. When we can believe that, we may find it easier to make constructive choices about what to do with those feelings. […] There’s the good guy and the bad guy in all of us, but knowing that doesn’t ever need to overwhelm us.”
The World According to Mr. Rogers, p. 20; p. 176
“Acknowledgement has great power. […] Merely acknowledge and accept as valid everything that goes on inside you and who you are. […] Whoever you are at the core, just let yourself be that way.
There’s an old saying in therapy that captures this principle well: You’ve got to be what you are to get where you are going. If you resist or deny where you are and who you are, it’s hard to move on to where you want to be.”
Bill O’Hanlon, Do One Thing Different
“If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.”
Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
“I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
”Everyone's broken. The only difference is how.”
Anna-Marie McLemore, Wild Beauty, p. 178
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change.”
Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
“I was with a Buddhist teacher a number of years ago. And he said, ‘Let me give you the secret. If you were to meditate for twenty years, this is where you’d finally get to: Just be yourself. But be all of you.’”
Jack Canfield, from The Path Made Clear, p.164
“For it is not what you are nor what you have been that God regards with his most merciful eyes, but what you would like to be.”
From The Cloud of Unknowing, quoted in Visions of God by Karen Armstrong
If you prefer a secular version, here’s the most welcoming restaurant Welcome sign I’ve ever seen:
“Come as you are. Come as you were. Or come as you’d like to be.”
Learning from Mistakes
“A small tattered book titled How to Fix Things You Wish You’d Never Done. [...] Septimus put it in his pocket. It was one of the most useful books he had come across in a long time.”
Angie Sage, StarChaser, p. 403
“Perfectionism means that you can never fail […] Perfectionism is not about doing your best or striving for high goals. Instead, it can block your ability to do well. The pursuit of excellence means taking risks, trying new things, growing, changing, and sometimes failing.”
Delisle and Galbraith, When Gifted Kids Don’t Have All the Answers, p. 64
“Wouldn’t it be great to add a mistakes course to the curriculum of our schools? ‘Okay, Tuesday I want you all to make mistakes; we’re going to learn from them. Don’t Cheat—no bringing in mistakes you’ve already made.’”
Philippe Petit, Creativity: The Perfect Crime, p. 147
Non-Conformity
“In trying to please other people, we lose our hold on our life’s purpose.”
Epictetus
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest human battle ever and to never stop fighting.”
e.e. cummings
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after one’s own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
“Thousands of exceptionally creative, highly-focused advertising executives are marshalling budgets in the billions to influence your values, self-image and buying habits. […] Maintaining independence of thought in the face of this onslaught requires a discipline similar to that developed through martial arts training.
[…] One of the most clever and cynical tactics of advertisers is expressed in the attempt to co-opt the image of independent thinking and individualism. Witness attempts to identify with ‘the Rebel’ and ‘the Individualist’ through such revolutionary gestures as [...] wearing a particular brand of jeans or sneakers.”
Michael Gelb, How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, p. 85-86
“While an Amish man in plain clothing or a Mennonite mother capped with a prayer bonnet may appear the epitome of conformity in relation to their group, they are better seen as the epitome of nonconformity in regards to the larger culture. Imagine an Amish man wearing a Nike swoosh on his straw hat or an Izod alligator under his suspenders; the image makes the point better than anything I could say.”
Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy
“What mindfulness is saying to all of us is, Find your own way. Listen to your own heart. Listen to your own longing. Because what we’re trying to do is live our life as if it really matters.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn, from The Path Made Clear, p. 53
“The story of the ugly duckling was never about the cygnet discovering he is lovely. It is not a story about realizing you have become beautiful. It is about the sudden understanding that you are something other than what you thought you were, and that what you are is more beautiful than what you once thought you had to be.”
Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja, p. 224
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
(If you choose to use these questions in a class or group: As with any other discussion about personal topics, please respect your students' wishes about how much they choose to share.)
Which is your favorite quote? Why?
Are there any quotations you don’t agree with? Why?
How has your identity changed over the past five years?
How do you expect your identity to have changed twenty years from now?
How do you feel when you make a mistake? Does it change the way you see yourself?
How do you feel when you do something successfully? Does it change the way you see yourself?
What connection (if any) do you see between mindfulness and non-conformity?
Related Posts
There are many more resources on self-awareness and self-acceptance here at MindfulTeachers.org, including the following posts: