Self Knowledge Quotes

The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

...[T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics. ... Unless this job is done, we will not know whether the answers philosophers give to their questions are a function of the conceptualization built into the questions themselves.

George Lakoff

The knowledge of ourselves, therefore, is not only an incitement to seek after God, but likewise a considerable assistance towards finding him.

John Calvin

The greatest of empires, is the empire over one's self.

Publilius Syrus

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.

Russell Hoban

I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.

Joshua Ferris

To know oneself means above all to know what one likes

Marty Rubin

Self-Knowledge is the Jewel of all Knowledge."-Serena Jade

Serena Jade

The interdependent couple is the new setting and their knowledge of Self is an ancient treasure."-Serena Jade

Serena Jade

Learn whom God has ordered you to be, and in what part of human affairs you have been placed.

Persius

Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.

Richard Rohr

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Nate Silver

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.

C.G. Jung

To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.

Flannery O'Connor

Recognizing who you are is not the subtext of a life. It's the main point.

Kiana Davenport

Applicants for wisdomdo what I have done:inquire within

Heraclitus

Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally; you may endure for a time, but under affliction or persecution your faith will not last. This is why many in this age (and in every age) become infidels, heretics, schismatics, disloyal despisers of the Church. They cast off the form of truth, because it never has been to them more than a form. They endure not, because they never have tasted that the Lord is gracious; and they never have had experience of His power and love, because they have never known their own weakness and need.

John Henry Newman

I believe I’m very normal. I’m hyper-normal. I’m more normal than anyone else I know. I think my thoughts, my indulgences, my desires, my pleasures may at first appear different, but that is only because they are more normal, not because they are more esoteric.I believe I am bored when other people are bored, only faster. I am interested when others are interested, only more interested. But I also think I’m less, rather than more, intelligent than other people.By indulging my interests through my life, and perhaps because of rather than despite many failures, I have been able to design my life.

Richard Saul Wurman

Throughout human history beauty has been seen as a gift from God, but Mom had another notion; she thought that beauty could be earned through self-knowledge. It may be a revolutionary idea, but it has offered me great comfort.

Ruth Reichl

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.

R.G. Collingwood

A person without her or his own truth ain't a person at all, Ida said. Anybody who tells you different—is a jackass, and no longer deserves to be called human being.

Tom Spanbauer

Are you indoctrinated?Think of anything you believe in be it religious or social, like economic systems or systems of government, etc., and think if you had ALL the information about what you believe in, and ALL the information about all the other/rival systems, and remember if you chose to adopt the one or the other by critical thinking or objective reasoning…No? …

Haroutioun Bochnakian

All outdoors may be bedlam, provided there is no disturbance within.

Seneca

There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise.

Alain de Botton

The immediate result of abandoned idealism is an embittered and drained man, whether he realizes it or not, whether he likes it or not. He is capable of acting in his own interest, but only to the extent that those interests coincide with those of the lowest animals.

Mike Klepper

Why has no one come to pry me out of here?- Cersei

George R.R. Martin

I spent a long time in the study of the abstract sciences, and was disheartened by the small number of fellow-students in them. When I commenced the study of man, I saw that these abstract sciences are not suited to man, and that I was wandering further from my own state in examining them, than others in not knowing them. I pardoned their little knowledge; but I thought at least to find many companions in the study of man, and that it was the true study which is suited to him. I have been deceived; still fewer study it than geometry. It is only from want of knowing how to study this that we seek the other studies. But is it not that even here is not the knowledge which man should have, and that for the purposes of happiness it is better for him not to know himself?

Pascal

The curve of man’s knowledge of himself ascends until the 17th century, declines gradually afterwards, in this century it finally plummets

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.

Frida Kahlo

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge--and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves--how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?

Friedrich Nietzsche

I want to know who I am before it is too late—before I am no longer the same person—before I become someone different. Although there are days when this seems a furious race against time, there are others when it seems to matter not a tinker's curse.

Alan Bradley

There is pleasure in reading a version of myself I know in my heart could never exist, since mine is not an iron mind coldly calculating every possible option and outcome. Instead I am a businessman who loves excitement, loves tension, loves risk and the unexpected, and just happens to possess an extraordinary, on occasion even miraculous, degree of good luck.

Jacob Wren

Our spirits rose after a few beers, all that lay between us during the day, the silences that could develop from nowhere, the irritation that could set in, the sudden inability to find areas of common interest, even though there were so many, all of that vanished as our spirits soared and we felt the concomitant warmth: we looked at each other and knew who we were.

Knausgaard

Life so far seemed like a kind of dance to him, and he was pleased to discover that he was pretty good at it. Lf there was something hollow underneath it all, a well of fear that sometimes seemed to pull everything else into it and leave him clutching the stone rim for fear of falling into himself, well, that was part of being human, he supposed. That's what the booze was for.

Nathan Ballingrud

Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God. Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true sound wisdom consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

John Calvin

At the end of your life there will be many people you won't be acquainted with.Make sure you are not among them.

Luigina Sgarro

Ignorance of ourselves must be folly.

A.L.O.E.

For all my wanderings, I'm ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is what he is--he can't rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings--Horatio Alger be damned!

Norman Lock

If I follow a particular method of knowing myself, then I shall have the result which that system necessitates; but the result will obviously not be the understanding of myself.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is a correlation between the severity of a person’s moods and a lack of self-knowledge.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everyone was, especially me.

Stephen Chbosky

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.

Jane Austen

It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.

Francis Bacon

Commandment #1: Believe in yourself. Commandment #2: Get over yourself.

Kristan Higgins

Deep down within the heart there is a stillness which is healing, a trust in the universal laws which is unwavering, and a strength which is rock-like. But because it is so deep we need both patience and perseverance when digging for it.

Paul Brunton

How much more infinite a sea is man? Be not so childish as to measure him from head to foot and think you have found his borders.

Mikhail Naimy

I saw myself.... In the time I watched, I saw strength—and frailty. Pride and vanity, courage and fear. Of wisdom, a little. Of folly, much. Of intentions, many good ones; but many more left undone. In this, alas, I saw myself a man like any other. But this, too, I saw.... Alike as men may seem, each is different as flakes of snow, no two the same. You told me you had no need to seek the Mirror, knowing you were Annlaw Clay-Shaper. Now I know who I am: myself and none other. I am Taran.

Lloyd Alexander

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

Bruce Lee

Men forget where the way leads and what they meet with every day seems strange to them.We should not act and speak like men asleep.

Heraclitus

I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.

Terry Tempest Williams

Understand that when the beast within yousucceeds again in paralyzing into unendingincompletion whatever you again had the temerity totry to makeits triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of itsrectitude. It knows that it aloneknows you.

Frank Bidart

Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don’t have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish.

Jessamyn West

In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light.

Nicole Krauss

The one who says he doesn't understand anything about art, doesn't know himself.

Jostein Gaarder

He has to come to it on his own.

Justin Cronin

What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.

Seneca

When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us

Alain de Botton

There is no method of self-knowledge. Seeking a method invariably implies the desire to attain some result – and that is what we all want. We follow authority – if not that of a person, then of a system, of an ideology – because we want a result that will be satisfactory, which will give us security. We really do not want to understand ourselves, our impulses and reactions, the whole process of our thinking, the conscious as well as the unconscious; we would rather pursue a system that assures us of a result. But the pursuit of a system is invariably the outcome of our desire for security, for certainty, and the result is obviously not the understand of oneself., When we follow a method, we must have authorities – the teacher, the guru, the savior, the Master – who will guarantee us what we desire, and surely that is not the way of self-knowledge. Authority prevents the understanding of oneself, does it not? Under the shelter of an authority, a guide, you may have temporarily a sense of security, a sense of well-being, but that is not the understanding of the total process of oneself. Authority in its very nature prevents the full awareness of oneself and therefore ultimately destroys freedom; in freedom alone can there be creativeness. There can be creativeness only through self-knowledge.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

My species should know the following about itself:-The universe created the ultimate abstract life-form by creating man, but scarcity “programmed” him to this current, ridiculously diminished version of himself.-Everyone and every community (clan) is everybody’s and every community’s future ally and brother in arms in what will be humanity’s decisive stand against scarcity, whether they realize it, desire it, or deny it.

Haroutioun Bochnakian

Be able to define yourself at all times. Do not wait for someone else to come and define you. Accept and embrace your individuality. Be inspired to be the BEST YOU and never let no one get your self esteem down.

Auliq-Ice

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Self Knowledge Quotes

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