Self Knowledge Quotes
C. JoyBell C.
To know a species, look at its fears. To know yourself, look at your fears. Fear in itself is not important, but fear stands there and points you in the direction of things that are important. Don't be afraid of your fears, they're not there to scare you; they're there to let you know that something is worth it.
2536 Alison Goodman
I found power in accepting the truth of who I am. It may not be a truth that others can accept, but I cannot live any other way. How would it be to live a lie every minute of your life.
3601 Benson Bruno
I don’t dwell on the fact that I may have ridden on planes. That which I can’t remember having needed, I simply accept. It is the most preferable kind of self-insight: one that does not require any accompanying change in behavior.
3815 Don Murray
My ignorance is essential. I do not write what I know but what I need to know.
2185 C. JoyBell C.
I am my own biggest critic. Before anyone else has criticized me, I have already criticized myself. But for the rest of my life, I am going to be with me and I don't want to spend my life with someone who is always critical. So I am going to stop being my own critic. It's high time that I accept all the great things about me.
2991 C. JoyBell C.
We must not be defined by what we do, but we must be what and who we are, then only happen to do what we do!
4189 Cees Nooteboom
Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.
1044 Stefan Molyneux
Baseless victimhood is usually the last stage before outright aggression.
2013 Stefan Molyneux
What we do not confront, we inhabit.
What we do not reject, we accept.
What we do not fight, we become.
2367 Stefan Molyneux
The tombstone over the grave of the conscience always reads: "Human Nature".
3437 Stefan Molyneux
There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.
1983 Alain De Botton
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
3736 Charlotte Eriksson
I believe in knowing who you are but without limiting yourself to your own expectation of who you are.
2842 Bell Hooks
Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.
1014 Ron White
I had the right to remain silent... but I didn't have the ability.
3093 C. JoyBell C.
The only person who can pull me down is myself, and I'm not going to let myself pull me down anymore.
3835 Czesław Miłosz
Learning
To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.
2166 Charlotte Eriksson
You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.
3504 Sarah Ban Breathnach
[I]t doesn’t matter whom you love or where you move from or to, you always take yourself with you. If you don’t know who you are, or if you’ve forgotten or misplaced her, then you’ll always feel as if you don’t belong. Anywhere. (xiii)
4937 C. JoyBell C.
I don't fit into any stereotypes. And I like myself that way.
1590 Stefan Molyneux
Forgiveness is created by the restitution of the abuser; of the wrongdoer. It is not something to be squeeeeeezed out of the victim in a further act of conscience-corrupting abuse.
1667 G.I. Gurdjieff
Knowledge can be acquired by a suitable and complete study, no matter what the starting point is. Only one must know how to 'learn.' What is nearest to us is man; and you are the nearest of all men to yourself. Begin with the study of yourself; remember the saying 'Know thyself.
3368 Stefan Molyneux
I refuse to let the standards of evil people chip away at my capacity for integrity.
1171 Stefan Molyneux
The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.
1844 Hermann Hesse
I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself.
2836 Mikhail Naimy
Ask not of things to shed their veils. Unveil yourselves, and things will be unveiled.
2251 Isocrates
Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.
1574 Paul Brunton
Whoever wants the "I" to yield up its mysterious and tremendous secret must stop it from looking perpetually in the mirror, must stop the little ego's fascination with its own image.
4699 Robertson Davies
But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory-humorous, poignant, humane allegory-disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.
2113 Stefan Molyneux
The greater the gap between self perception and reality, the more aggression is unleashed on those who point out the discrepancy.
4538 James Rozoff
It is wisdom to know who you are, but not to the point of excluding who you might become.
1618 J.S.B. Morse
I've learned far too much to know everything.
4730 John Calvin
The knowledge of ourselves, therefore, is not only an incitement to seek after God, but likewise a considerable assistance towards finding him.
1673 Claudia Gray
Self-knowledge is better than self-control any day," Raquel said firmly. "And I know myself well enough to know how I act around cookies.
4715 Laurie Gray
Answer all the questions. Question all the answers.
1654 Angelus Silesius
If Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times and not in thee thyself; then art thou lost eternally.
1324 Stefan Molyneux
When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.
2606 Stefan Molyneux
Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.
3974 C. JoyBell C.
There is a magnificent, beautiful, wonderful painting in front of you! It is intricate, detailed, a painstaking labor of devotion and love! The colors are like no other, they swim and leap, they trickle and embellish! And yet you choose to fixate your eyes on the small fly which has landed on it! Why do you do such a thing?
1503 C. JoyBell C.
If you walk on sunlight, bathe in moonlight, breathe in a golden air and exhale a Midas' touch; mark my words, those who exist in the shadows will try to pull you into the darkness with them. The last thing that they want is for you to see the wonder of your life because they can't see theirs.
4152 C. JoyBell C.
The most adventurous journey to embark on; is the journey to yourself, the most exciting thing to discover; is who you really are, the most treasured pieces that you can find; are all the pieces of you, the most special portrait you can recognize; is the portrait of your soul.
3037 C. JoyBell C.
Let us each take up our flaming torches and mount as the blazing fireballs of light that we are and let's burn the skies and leave it with deep scars and let them be our signatures upon eternity as we go forth!
1111 Stefan Molyneux
The processing of universals is the job of the unconscious. If we feed it the opposite it breaks; when it breaks we break and the people around us break.
1136 Nathaniel Branden
All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibility- that is, the experience of being seen and understood.
1766 Stefan Molyneux
If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don't think it's the children who need to be adjusted.
3838 Vironika Tugaleva
If you do not respect your own wishes, no one else will. You will simply attract people who disrespect you as much as you do.
1460 Stefan Molyneux
There is no key to open the heart of another - except curiosity.
4166 Stefan Molyneux
Sanity is not about confrontation. It's about filtering. Having a stable and happy life is about saying "no" to crazy people, not about inviting them in and then hoping that confrontations are going to make them sane.
4402 Stefan Molyneux
All money does with an empty heart is allow you to be miserable in style.
1199 Rasheed Ogunlaru
Funny how in a material world full of pundits and economists obsessed with assets and liabilities -personally, economically and globally - few speak about the greatest of all these…YOU.
3534 Frank Herbert
Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!
4254 Russell Hoban
How was I to be a scientist, father Lion?' Science is knowing. What could I have known? Others always did the knowing, knew what was in me, what should come out of me, what was best for me. I didn't know who I was, what I wanted. I know less now, and I am afraid.
1774 Jonathan Franzen
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
3913 Vironika Tugaleva
The answers to your problems lie all around you. The keys to your self-discovery are waiting to be found in each sunset, each pair of eyes, each breath of fresh air. Listen to the symphony of life and you will hear yourself. Find the beauty of nature and you have found your soul.
1453 Charles Olson
If he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.
1758 Don DeLillo
The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.
3055 James Kubicki
To know oneself and one’s end or goal in life is true wisdom - knowledge of the heart more than the head.
3704 Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Our instrumental part in the symphony of life is to allow love to create a space within our own awareness, through which the undreamed mystery may emerge as a knowable reality.
2592 Chaim Potok
An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.
2755 Eric Micha'el Leventhal
No matter how strange things get, know that with every breath, you are becoming that which you have always been.
3087 R. G. Collingwood
History is for human self-knowledge…the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
4538 Vironika Tugaleva
If you ate nails, your stomach would hurt, and it’s a good thing that it would. Eating nails is deadly, thus the pain is helpful. Like this, sadness, anger, and anxiety are not to be feared or shamed, but listened to and decoded.
1323 Stefan Molyneux
To be yourself is in many ways to be inconvenient to others. Only placaters and appeasers get along with other people all the time and that's not really getting along with anyone. That's just self erasure.
4440 John Williams
You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what do.
- Archer Sloane from the book Stoner.
1920 Lucretia Mott
Liberty is no less a blessing because oppression has so long darkened the mind that it can not appreciate it.
2210 G.I. Gurdjieff
You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can't escape.
3419 Nathaniel Branden
Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.
1550 Stefan Molyneux
When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.
1707 Stefan Molyneux
When people encounter the free market and they recoil or react negatively to it, they're merely confessing that voluntaryism, trade and negotiation are foreign and threatening to them, which tells you everything about how tragically they were raised.
1504 Stefan Molyneux
The vast majority of people are unthinking prejudice machines.
4032 Nathaniel Branden
The challenge for people today-and it is not and easy one-is to maintain high personal standards even while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer.
3071 Jeffrey Tucker
The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.
3445 Stefan Molyneux
Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.
1661 Stefan Molyneux
Irrational expectations are at the root of most human suffering.
3891 Stefan Molyneux
There’s nothing lonelier than empty relationships. At least when you’re alone you can be yourself, but when you’re in empty relationships you can’t even be yourself.
You can be real alone, or you can be a ghost with false friends.
Pulse proximity is not intimacy, and it’s worse than no friends at all.
3229 Stefan Molyneux
The only part of you that hurts when you're given the truth is the part that lives on lies.
2274 Vironika Tugaleva
Self-improvement without self-love is like building a house upon sand. You can build and build, but it will always sink.
1223 Stefan Molyneux
The only relationships that exist are based on truth. Everything else is just a mutual and isolating delusion.
3514 Stefan Molyneux
The three most important words in a relationship are not, 'I love you,' but, 'Tell me more.
1994 Shepherd Hoodwin
To know someone, we must experience him, and that knowing will not exceed our self-knowledge - we cannot know someone else to a greater depth than we know ourselves.
3116 Vironika Tugaleva
When you discover your own self, you will see that same infinite potential in your lover’s eyes.
2397 Marty Rubin
What we say about ourselves is always a form of fiction.
4068 Ann Landers
Class is an aura of confidence that is being sure without being cocky. Class has nothing to do with money. Class never runs scared. It is self-discipline and self-knowledge. It's the sure-footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.
1598 Gabor Maté
The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.
3510 Pascal Mercier
To stand by yourself - that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself.
3612 Aberjhani
Know yourself fearlessly (even quietly) for all the things you are.
2848 Golda Poretsky
You are not broken. You are not a problem to be solved. Solving your “problem”, whatever you perceive your problem or problems to be, is not the key to happiness.
1242 Carl R. Rogers
In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?
1594 Nathaniel Branden
The idea of original sin-of guilt with no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives-inherently militates against self-esteem. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality. Sin is not original, it is originated-like virtue.
3891 Nathaniel Branden
The greater a child’s terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.
1756 Nathaniel Branden
Integrity is congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do.
3126