70 Self Awareness Quotes: Insights for Growth & Abundance

Gain the clarity you need for a personal breakthrough and abundant success by checking out this extensive list of self awareness quotes!

What if the secret to a richer, more successful life wasn’t about looking harder, but about looking inward? Self-knowledge is the essential first step toward every meaningful change. The following list of self awareness quotes – organized by themes such as emotional intelligence, leadership, and personal growth – will challenge your perspective and provide the wisdom necessary to lead yourself (and others) toward a better future!

(by Jonathan M. Pham)

Short Self Awareness Quotes

1. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. – Aristotle

2. The unexamined life is not worth living. – Socrates

3. Awareness is the greatest agent for change. – Eckhart Tolle

4. Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. – Oscar Wilde

5. When I discover who I am, I’ll be free. – Ralph Ellison

Inspirational Self Awareness Quotes

6. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. – Carl Jung

7. The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. – Carl Jung

8. You either walk inside your story and own it, or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness. – Brené Brown

9. What’s important is that you stay true to yourself. Because when you enter the real world, the most valuable thing you can bring is all your you-ness. – Bo Burnham

10. To know yourself, you must sacrifice the illusion that you already do. – Vironika Tugaleva

Positive self awareness quotes

Deep Self Awareness Quotes

11. Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. – Carl Jung

12. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. – Carl Jung

13. Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. – Lao Tzu

14. We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. – Kurt Vonnegut

15. To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; not to realize that you do not understand is a defect. – Lao Tzu

Famous quotes about self awareness

Mindfulness Self Awareness Quotes

16. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. – Thích Nhất Hạnh

17. Mindfulness isn’t difficult; we just need to remember to do it. – Sharon Salzberg

18. Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed. – Thích Nhất Hạnh

19. Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. – Viktor Frankl

20. The greatest gift you can give yourself is a little bit of your own attention. – Anthony J. D’Angelo

Read more: 70 Self Reflection Quotes – Looking Inward to Move Forward

Self care quotes

Self Acceptance Quotes

21. The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. – Carl Rogers

22. What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly. – Carl Rogers

23. You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody. – Maya Angelou

24. Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll ever do. – Brené Brown

25. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Read more: 58 Believe in Yourself Quotes for Motivation & Taking the Leap

Self love quotes

Self Awareness Quotes for Work

26. Self-awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st century. – Tasha Eurich

27. Self-awareness isn’t one truth. It’s a delicate balance of two distinct, even competing viewpoints: how we see ourselves and how others see us. – Tasha Eurich

28. Until you know yourself, you cannot lead yourself. Until you can lead yourself, you cannot lead others. – John C. Maxwell

29. Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. – Brené Brown

30. Only when you have the self-awareness to examine your program – and the imagination and conscience to create a new, unique, principle-centered program to which you can say “yes” – only then will you have sufficient independent will power to say “no,” with a genuine smile, to the unimportant. – Stephen R. Covey

Read more: 60 Communication Quotes for Work

Self Awareness & Growth Quotes

31. Self-awareness is the ability to take an honest look at your life without any attachment to it being right or wrong, good or bad. – Debbie Ford

32. The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance. – Nathaniel Branden

33. We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change. – Sheryl Sandberg

34. Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness. – Jean Vanier

35. There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. – Ernest Hemingway

Read more: 55 Growth Mindset Quotes – Insights for Business & Life

Self Awareness & Emotional Intelligence Quotes

36. Emotional intelligence begins with what is called self-awareness—getting in touch with your true feelings. – Daniel Goleman

37. When I am aware of my emotions, I can choose how to respond rather than react. – Travis Bradberry

38. The key to emotional mastery is awareness. You can’t change what you don’t notice. – Tony Robbins

39. Awareness of our emotions is what gives us the ability to manage them. – Susan David

40. Feelings are much like waves, we can’t stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf. – Jonatan Mårtensson

Self Awareness & Leadership Quotes

41. Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. – Jack Welch

42. Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate to and connect with people. – Oprah Winfrey

43. The most dangerous leadership blind spot is not knowing what you don’t know. – Tasha Eurich

44. The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets people to do the greatest things. – Ronald Reagan

45. Effective leadership starts with self-awareness. – Bill George

Read more: 110 Leadership Quotes – Daily Doses of Inspiration to Unlock Greatness

Self Awareness & Accountability Quotes

46. If anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves. Each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else, for each one should carry their own load. – Galatians 6:3-5

47. Accountability breeds response-ability. – Stephen Covey

48. You are not responsible for the programming you picked up in childhood. But as an adult, you are responsible for fixing it. – Ken Keyes Jr.

49. We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. – George Bernard Shaw

50. When you blame others, you give up your power to change. – Robert Anthony

Read more: 40 Accountability Quotes – The Glue That Binds

Self Awareness & Identity Development Quotes

51. We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn. – Mary Catherine Bateson

52. Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself. – Erich Fromm

53. The story you tell about yourself determines the person you become. – Matthew Kelly

54. Your identity emerges out of your habits. – James Clear

55. You are not what happened to you, you are what you choose to become. – Carl Jung

Read more: 60 Coaching Quotes – Words of Wisdom on the Path to Greatness

Self Awareness Philosophy Quotes

56. By becoming self-aware, you gain ownership of reality; in becoming real, you become the master of both inner and outer life. – Deepak Chopra

57. Knowing yourself is the beginning of wisdom and the end of fear. – Krishnamurti

58. Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides. – André Malraux

59. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself. – Michel de Montaigne

60. Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself. – John Locke

Lack of Self Awareness Quotes

61. We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. – Anaïs Nin

62. The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. – Daniel J. Boorstin

63. Many of us are caught up in the illusion of who we think we are. – Deepak Chopra

64. The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness. – Bull Durham (1988)

65. A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote. – James Clear

No self awareness quotes

Read more: 45 Conflict Resolution Quotes – Unlock Harmony

Funny Self Awareness Quotes

66. I have an identity crisis every time I look in the mirror. – Matthew Perry

67. I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong. – Russell Lynes

68. I am so clever that sometimes I don”t understand a single word of what I am saying. – Oscar Wilde

69. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn’t require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. – Matt Taibbi

70. Self-awareness, yes, but not self-help. – Deepak Chopra

Best self awareness quotes

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• 75 Positive Thinking Quotes: Inspire Your Best Self
• 75 Creativity Quotes: From Vision to Innovation
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