Knowledge Quotes

Show me a sensible person who likes himself or herself! I know myself too well to like what I see. I know but too well that I'm not what I'd like to be.

~ Golda Meir

Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

~ Adrienne Rich

Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself-in fact till it does that it hardly is experience.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Self-knowledge is the beginning of self-improvement.

~ Spanish Proverb

We are the same people as we were at three six ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so perhaps at six or seven because we were not pretending so much then.

~ Agatha Christie

Until we see what we are we cannot take steps to become what we should be.

~ Charlotte P. Gilman

When a man begins to understand himself he begins to live.

~ Norvin G. Mcgranahan

A humble knowledge of oneself is a surer road to God than a deep searching of the sciences.

~ Thomas À Kempis

If you do not ask yourself what it is you know you will go on listening to others and change will not come because you will not hear your own truth.

~ Saint Bartholomew

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

~ Thomas Mann

Sometimes a person has to go back really back-to have a sense an understanding of all that's gone to make them-before they can go forward.

~ Paule Marshall

Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go.

~ Georges Gurdjieff

Self-searching is the means by which we bring new vision action and grace to bear upon the dark and negative side of our natures. With it comes the development of that kind of humility that makes it possible for us to receive God's help. ... We find that bit by bit we can discard the old life-the one that did not work-for a new life that can and does work under conditions whatever.

~ Anonymous

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.

~ Thales

You never find yourself until you face the truth.

~ Pearl Bailey

It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself but the most inconvenient too.

~ Josh Billings

Long ago I understood that it wasn't merely my being a woman that was preventing my being welcomed into the world of what I long thought of as my peers. It was that I had succeeded in an undertaking few men have even attempted: I have become myself.

~ Alice Koller

He knows the universe and does not know himself.

~ Jean De La Fontaine

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

~ Carol Shields

No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

~ Joseph Conrad

Nothing is easier than self-deceit.

~ Demosthenes

Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.

~ Wilma Rudolph

One may understand the cosmos but never the ego the self is more distant than any star.

~ G. K. Chesterton

You can live a lifetime and at the end of it know more about other people than you know about yourself.

~ Beryl Markham

Learn what you are and be such.

~ Pindar

Long tresses down to the floor can be beautiful if you have that but learn to love what you have.

~ Anita Baker

I am no longer what I was. I will remain what I have become.

~ Coco Chanel

I always introduce myself as an encyclopedia of defects which I do not deny. Why should I? It took me a whole life to build myself as I am.

~ Oriana Fallaci

The happy man is he who knows his limitations yet bows to no false gods.

~ Robert W. Service

I shall be an autocrat that's my trade and the good Lord will forgive me that's his.

~ Catherine The Great

Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do than what one can.

~ Lin Yutang

Somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Self-understanding rather than self-condemnation is the way to inner peace and mature conscience.

~ Joshua L. Liebman

To say something nice about themselves this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do.

~ Nancy Friday

After my screen test the director clapped his hands gleefully and yelled She can't talk! She can't act! She's sensational!

~ Ava Gardner

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings they gradually begin to seem mild harmless rather engaging little things not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

~ Margaret Halsey

It's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous but rather the studious way we try to hide them and our desire to act as if they did not exist.

~ Giacomo Leopardi

Of all the idiots I have met in my life and the Lord knows that they have not been few or little I think that I have been the biggest.

~ Isak Dinesen

A woman of mystique is fully aware of her flaws and weaknesses yet she is strong enough to admit them and not be embarrassed by them.

~ Jean Lush

Learning too soon our limitations we never learn our powers.

~ Mignon Mclaughlin