Nikola Tesla Quotes

Much of the time, we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world. And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves.

I try not to be super self-referential about my work because it becomes like navel gazing at a certain point.

Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God, we do not see ourselves - blessed riddance. The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One.

Actors and actresses who say they never go to see their own pictures are talking through their hats. You don't have to be a Freud to know that the most fascinating person in the world - actors or anybody - is yourself.

Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

A man is ever apt to contemplate himself out of all proportion to his surroundings.

I used to be weird about it, but I think sometimes you can learn from watching yourself and all the mistakes you make and try to continue growing. But I'm completely uncomfortable for sure.

No man has a chance to enjoy permanent success until he begins to look in a mirror for the real cause of all his mistakes.

I have known men who could see through the motivations of others with the skill of a clairvoyant; only to prove blind to their own mistakes. I have been one of those men.

Be sensitive to your mistakes. Put it on the wall for a couple of weeks. It may be that you can learn more from the study of your own work than from others.

Be conscious first of thyself within, then think and act.

We are better able to study our neighbours than ourselves, and their actions than our own.

One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

I find myself fascinating.

I am not very introspective.

A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.

If I can avoid looking at myself, I will. I don't care to examine myself or see much of what I do. I never care how I look.

I find myself a fascinating subject.

I don't interest myself that much.

Looking at yourself in a mirror isn't exactly a study of life.

I think it's important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.