Amos Oz Quotes

More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don't is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively

If you don't look at yourself and evaluate it, you instead see how the world's reacting to it.

The act of writing... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people's actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

I want to take the time to think through how I feel and why I feel. I don't want to feign expertise on matters I know nothing about for the purpose of offering someone else my immediate reaction for their consumption.

The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America.

Bad Religion's tradition has always been to try and provoke people but hopefully lead them to a better sense of who they are and what they stand for. That's supposed to make them feel better.

The one thing I've tried to do is be insightful.

I'm a deep person. I'm not a superficial person at all.

I love to study people and pick apart what makes a person or character who they are. I never want to get complacent in that.

I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do.

Forming characters! Whose? Our own or others? Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and Responsibility of our existence.

An autobiography should give the reader opportunity to point out the author's follies and misconceptions.

All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else.

There’s nothing to it. All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else. We’re in no way different ourselves... You show me someone who can’t understand people and I’ll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you.

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

When you question what you believe, you leave the world, really, and what the world believes. It puts you in a very interesting position.

I don't want to sound like a self-help book, but it really has been transformative for me to take a look at my relationships in a new way and see my part in them. Everybody's going through that.

At certain periods of life, we live years of emotion in a few weeks, and look back on those times as on great gaps between the old life and the new.

When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.

Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change.

If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares you or angers you.