William Boyd Quotes

Writing in a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself.

Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.

I learned so much about life and other human beings - then about myself.

'Aura' is a song where you're looking at yourself in the mirror, and I was personally impacted when I recorded it. I identified with it.

I love to watch human beings figuring out their limitations.

To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.

In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

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.

I think that those of us who are ordinary disappear easily into the backdrop of life and we take things for granted. We often wake up in our lives and wonder how we got there. But the characters I create, the people I am drawn to, are quite extraordinary (and not always in wholesome ways), and they offer us the chance to understand who we really are and how we became who we are.

The more you see what other people do, the more you learn about yourself.

We teach what we need to learn.

What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

Women see through each other, but they rarely look into themselves.

We must learn to be honest with ourselves, and know our shortcomings. We will acquire cohesion but we will pay dearly for being a slow pupil.

The news that reaches your consciousness is incomplete and often not to be relied on.... Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself!

The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!

I wasn’t ready to think about the other yet: that it wasn’t that I wasn’t right for Macon, but that maybe he wasn’t right for me. There was a difference. Even for someone who things didn’t come easy for, someone like me.

We grow tired of ourselves, much more of other people.

Part of my gestalt is that I still feel a little bit like a wallflower. Even in my own life. I talk about myself behind my back.

This is the key to life: the ability to reflect, the ability to know yourself, the ability to pause for a second before reacting automatically. If you can truly know yourself, you will begin the journey of transformation.

You have to self-reflect. If you forget who you actually are, then what's the use of even looking in the mirror.

And I laugh at myself for thinking I could touch the sky.