Vannevar Bush Quotes

You have to attempt to be objective about yourself.

The examined life is no picnic.

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

You need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and not come away thinking, "Hey, there's something wrong with this mirror."

Get to know yourself. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them from what you see. Know also when you actually have thought through to the nature of the thing with which you are dealing and when you are not thinking at all... Knowing yourself and knowing the facts, you can judge whether you can change the situation so it is more to your liking. If you cannot--or if you do not know how to improve on things--then discipline yourself to the adjustments that will be necessary.

Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it's a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that's really chewing on us.

Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside.

As one grows older one becomes more critical of oneself and less of other people.

'What am I missing?' is a much more important question than 'How cool am I?'

I try not to be overly analytical.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

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.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

It surprises me that more people don't take a look in the mirror a little more often and assess their own relationships.

I'm not good at watching myself.

When you practice Buddhism, you have to always self-reflect, and you can't avoid your problems. That makes me understand human beings better. I feel that the more I do that in my own life, the more I can see how to play a character.

You know, the benefit in life is to say, 'Maybe you made a mistake, let's dig deep.'

I think I tend to live in sort of a meta state of existence where I'm always analyzing and analyzing whatever I'm going through at any given moment, and a lot of times I'll reflect back on and go, 'Oh look at that - if I acted this way when that happened, I might not have thought of that that way.'

I am a scholar of life. Every night before I go to sleep, I analyze every detail of what I did that day. I evaluate things and people, which helps me avoid mistakes.

Observe all men, thyself most.

I'm my own severest critic, and I realize when I make mistakes.

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?

I think I'm pretty self-aware.

I start asking a lot of questions about my own life, and it's not necessarily fun, but it's a good exercise.

I'm not afraid to blame myself for any of my own faults or just to analyze things in a different way, but I don't overanalyze, either.