Lack of Self-Awareness Quotes

The man who acts the least, upbraids the most.

How come those who know the least know it the loudest?

As to the human race. There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of all the gods but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims without bashfulness or any sign of a blush that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it-it is like hitting a child.

A preacher who doesn't believe he's that bad will attract people who don't think they're that bad. And that's bad.

I mean, really: what kind of person could possibly dislike me?

The mad rarely know that they are mad. It's the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them.

In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.

People don't know what they are doing most of the time. They don't know what they want. It's only in 'the movies' that they know what their problems are and have game plans to deal with them.

The blindness of men is the most dangerous effect of their pride; it seems to nourish and augment it; it deprives them of knowledge of remedies which can solace their miseries and can cure their faults.

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives ... their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.... Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.

If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.

And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.

We often think more highly of ourselves than we ought to, and it's easy to judge others and be critical of their weaknesses and shortcomings. But this self-righteous attitude is a sin that we can be blinded to because we're so focused on what the other person did wrong. The reality is this attitude is worse than the wrong behavior we're judging.

Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch.

One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.

Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat.

The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

Do you remember when you told me I couldn't see myself clearly? You obviously have the same blindness

Whenever a man boasts much about [his common sense], you may be pretty sure that he has very little sense, either common or uncommon.

One of the things that happens to careers out here is that people destroy themselves because they begin to think they're wonderful. They begin to think they know what they're doing, and the minute that happens, it's over.

The overriding problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves.

We often boast that we are never bored; but yet we are so conceited that we do not perceive how often we bore others.

Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven’t the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren’t worth a goddamned thing.

What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously.

The self-righteous rule out the possibility that they are what has gone wrong.