Self Knowledge Quotes - Page 4

The only part of you that hurts when you're given the truth is the part that lives on lies.

There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.

The only relationships that exist are based on truth. Everything else is just a mutual and isolating delusion.

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.

Stefan Molyneux

In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions.

Nathaniel Branden

The tombstone over the grave of the conscience always reads: "Human Nature".

Stefan Molyneux

Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.

Nathaniel Branden

There's no weakness as great as false strength.

Stefan Molyneux

Excuses are a promise of repetition.

Stefan Molyneux

Most people do not erode their self-esteem over big issues but over small ones, little acts of betrayal and hypocrisy forgotten (repressed) very quickly. But the computer in your subconscious mind forgets nothing. It records your spiritual profit and loss. The balance sheet reflects your present level of self-esteem--and sends you the information via your emotions.

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.

Nathaniel Branden

One of the great self-deceptions--and one of the great foolishnesses--is to tell yourself, Only I will know. Only you will know that you are a liar; only you will know you deal unethically with people who trust you; only you will know you have no intention of honoring your promise. Whose knowledge or judgment do you imagine is more important? It is precisely your own ego from which there is no escape.

Nathaniel Branden

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.

Stefan Molyneux

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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.

Nathaniel Branden

Vengeance against predators is meals on wheels.

Stefan Molyneux

Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.

Stefan Molyneux

The essential quality of a market system, contrary to popular thinking, is not that it promotes greed; but rather, that it renders greed harmless.

Israel M. Kirzner

The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.

John Cleese

It is a mistake to look at someone who is self assertive and say, "It's easy for her, she has good self-esteem." One of the ways you build self-esteem is by being self-assertive when it is not easy to do so. There are always times when self-assertiveness requires courage, no matter how high your self-esteem.

Nathaniel Branden

One of the best ways of repressing emotions is artificial certainty.

Stefan Molyneux

Genuine self esteem – please understand this – genuine self esteem is not competitive or comparative. Genuine self esteem isn’t expressed by self-glorification at the expense of others, or by trying to make yourself superior to everyone else, or diminishing others in order to elevate yourself. Arrogance, boastfulness, the overestimation of your abilities, reflect low self esteem, even though we’re often encouraged to believe the opposite. In human beings, joy in the simple fact of existence is a core meaning of healthy self esteem. Thus understood, how can you possibly have too much of it?

Nathaniel Branden

Integrity is congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do.

Nathaniel Branden

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?

Carl R. Rogers

The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. “I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.

Stefan Molyneux

The vast majority of people are unthinking prejudice machines.

Stefan Molyneux

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.

G.I. Gurdjieff

I've learned far too much to know everything.

J.S.B. Morse

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.

Rasheed Ogunlaru

It seems like such an amazing predicament to me, how one does not become a better person by seeking out in the world those who are lesser than himself and then saying, "I will be better than you because you're not as good as me." You don't become better by looking at others and trying to be better than them. You become a better person by looking at yourself in the mirror, and, seeking to overcome and to overthrow all the flaws within yourself, you overcome the weaker you, the lesser you; you become the better You, the stronger You, the higher You. That's how it goes.

C. JoyBell C.

Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.

Camille Paglia

Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

Salman Rushdie

The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.

Gabor Maté

One minute with a silent spirit of self-knowledge is enough to align you to put smiles on the face of the boring world. The world needs you! Yes it does!

Israelmore Ayivor

Don’t ever feel bad for making a decision about your own life that upsets other people. You are not responsible for their happiness. You’re responsible for your own happiness. Anyone who wants you to live in misery for their happiness should not be in your life anyway.

Isaiah Hankel

Nothing we ever imagined is beyond our powers, only beyond our present self-knowledge.

Theodore Roszak

Self-knowledge is power.

David Cohen

I always have my reasons, even when I don't know what they are.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.

Stanley Milgram

The metaphysical poetry of our innovative life springs from the aesthetic, scenic, and systematic processes of inventiveness, the creative impulse of an active mind generating aesthetical intuition.

Kilroy J. Oldster

The most profound personal growth does not happen while reading a book or meditating. It happens in the throes of conflict, when you are angry, afraid, frustrated. It happens when you are doing the same old thing and you suddenly realize that you have a choice.

Vironika Tugaleva

Our “selves”, our “being”, our “ego”, our “soul”, our individuality, our personality, … is only our mind continuously adapting to its environment to insure survival and well-being, working with whatever inherited predispositions (formed by previous generations of minds adapting to their environment) it has to work with.If we could only make our beautiful mind come in contact with the facts, ALL the facts… , we could trust it with the rest, ALL the rest.Our beautiful mind will always do the right thing.Always.The thing is to find the facts. ALL the facts. Not one less.

Haroutioun Bochnakian

The human mind – a product of the brain – controls our ability to adapt to a hostile or friendly environment. Human beings are composed of fields of energy, some of which forces are positive, and other force fields are negative. We can use constructive reason to penetrate only a limited segment of the human mind, which projects discernible logical thought process. A person’s mind also houses dark areas of reality, the mysterious apparatus that eludes the grasp of human reason. We can never express the truth of a person with a precise lucid principle. A person must travel beyond realism in order to explore every facet of his or her being and live his or her most cherished dreams.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I never really grew up until I had kids.

Stefan Molyneux

At that moment, when the world around him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy despair, but he was more firmly himself than ever. That was the last shudder of his awakening, the last pains of birth. Immediately he moved on again and began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homewards, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards.

Hermann Hesse

Family is always a mirror. You can hide from other people, you can even hide from yourself, but your family is going to reflect what you’re doing right back at you.

Martina Boone

Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.

Cees Nooteboom

To know oneself and one’s end or goal in life is true wisdom—knowledge of the heart more than the head.

James Kubicki

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.

Ann Landers

It's okay for someone to tell me who they think I am, but it's not okay when they try to impose that idea on me.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

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.

Golda Poretsky

Difficulties of life are valuable opportunities for self-discovery.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Your pain is trying to tell you something. It is not an accident, a curse, or an inconvenience. Pain is a form of self-communication.

Vironika Tugaleva

Every bit of pain can be a blessing if we choose to listen to its message.

Vironika Tugaleva

The purpose of life is to become acquainted with the deepest recesses of a person’s own mind by reflecting upon what a person reads, witnesses, and personally experiences. Wisdom is a form of power. Lacking knowledge of the world and without comprehending the essence of humanity, we can never know the truth of our own being.

Kilroy J. Oldster

When one attains self-knowledge, distinctions of race and religion vanish.

Abhijit Naskar

Your brain doesn't know what it cannot do until you tell it.

Ed Strachar

[P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.

Jonathan Franzen

To prove to [her friend, Swedish diplomat Count] Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, "so that he would see whether I knew myself or not." The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled 'Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.' He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. "I read his remarks again and again, many times [Catherine later recalled in her memoirs]. I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: 'What a pity that you will marry! I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me.

Robert K. Massie

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Self Knowledge Quotes - Page 4

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