Ben Harper Quotes

If I'd been a parent to myself, I would have been scared because I was only ever interested in my own thoughts.

My generation spends too much time in the mirror and not enough looking inside ourselves.

As I look back over my life, I've been an active person - obviously I was self-absorbed for a period of time.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

I'd like to lose interest in myself.

The more I focused on my need to get better the worse I actually got - the more neurotic and self-conscious and self-absorbed I became.

There is nothing else anything like so interesting to ourselves as ourselves.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.

There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.

I wish I could say confidently that pacing remains my weak point, if you could talk about your own stuff without sounding like you're self-obsessed. But I think you kind of have to be.

i was perhaps an egotist in youth, but i soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself

There's no journey worth taking except the journey through one's self. That's the most important journey you take. I found that out as I went around the world many times: I was learning about me.

living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.

Lonely people console themselves with self-absorption or curiosity.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self.

It's really about connecting to your own humanity and your own behaviors, and getting to a level of self-awareness so that you can have perspective and step outside of yourself and transform and become another person.

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity.

Self-knowledge is the great power by which we comprehend and control our lives

Self-reflection is the school of wisdom.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

Even with limited intelligence, knowing oneself is not as difficult as some say, but to act according to what one has realized about oneself in real life is as difficult as practicing anything else, compared to theory.

I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.