Self Knowledge Quotes

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

~ 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

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

Pulse proximity is not intimacy.

~ Stefan Molyneux

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

~ Stefan Molyneux

There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.

~ Stefan Molyneux

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

~ Stefan Molyneux

The unconscious is the true accumulation of your history. It can be accepted or rejected but it can't fundamentally be altered.

~ Stefan Molyneux

You only grow when you are alone.

~ Paul Newman

Little faults become great, and even monstrous in our eyes, in proportion as the pure light of God increases in us; just as the sun in rising, reveals the true dimensions of objects which were dimly and confusedly discovered during the night.

~ François Fénelon

All forms of writing are an act of conception; writing must lead to creation. Each time that we write, we begin again. Writing is an act of self-affirmation. Each time that we place our thoughts onto paper, we receive a new opportunity to claim our reality. Writing is also an act of explication and deconstruction. Writing empowers us to shape and modify our fiery constitutions. Writing allows us to explore the essential ingredients that lead to a life of serenity by exhibiting compassion, love, patience, generosity, and forgiveness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A restless human heart always seeks to increase personal understanding and works to attain excellence.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Reading, writing, and personal introspection will not protect us from hardship and suffering, but they might introduce us to critical thinking and expose us to what is good in humankind and beautiful in the world that we share with all of nature. Contemplative thought, especially that supplemented with reading literature and attempting to write our own replies to the echoing voices of writers whom preceded us provide us with the potentiality for change, the possibility of personal illumination that enables us to experience a heighted quality of life.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Who can claim to know you more than you know yourself? You have been with yourself all your life, after all.

~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Self-improvement without self-love is like building a house upon sand. You can build and build, but it will always sink.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?

~ Maurice Ravel

Our personal story has many chapters that reconnoiter universal themes. We each struggle to understand ourselves and aspire to make ourselves known to the world. We struggle to win the love of other people. We seek to pick all the low hanging fruit that we come across in our journey through the corridor of time. We write our story in the Niagara of emotional experiences that flowing watercourse makes us human. We use a profusion of words, symbols, and the nuances pulled from a rich library of language to depict the cascade of our visions, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, dreams, and infelicitous thoughts. We use logical and dialectal thought processes when communing with our inner self. We use self-speak along with the esemplastic powers of poetic imagination, sprinkled with the fizz of creativity, to cohere disparate chapters of our life into a unified whole and relay the effervescence of our story to other people.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people — I didn’t judge! — but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.

~ Lev Grossman

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

One is either an artist or one is not. It is not something one becomes. It is something that one is from birth. We do not study to be artists. We study to become more proficient. To understand more.

~ Edward Swift

Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.

~ Neel Burton

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery.

~ Andrew Solomon

I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.

~ Daniel Woodrell

I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment, the little daily dose.

~ C.s. Lewis

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

~ Alain De Botton

Thinking, he walked ever more slowly and asked himself, What is it now that you were hoping to learn from doctrines and teachers, and what is it that they—who taught you so much—were unable to teach you? And, he decided, It was the Self whose meaning and nature I wished to learn. It was the Self I wished to escape from, wished to overcome. But I was unable to overcome it, I could only trick it, could only run away from it and hide. Truly, not a single thing in all the world has so occupied my thoughts as this Self of mine, this riddle: that I am alive and that I am One, am different and separate from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And there is not a thing in the world about which I know less than about myself, about Siddhartha!

~ Hermann Hesse

I believe in knowing who you are but without limiting yourself to your own expectation of who you are.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

The thing about traveling alone, is that you run into your insecurities and fears times ten the normal! You run into all the good things and all the bad things about yourself on a daily basis, and are allowed the opportunity to truly become your own friend. Traveling alone is a learning process; some people travel for leisure, I travel to run into myself!

~ C. Joybell C.

Writing is mental exercise and the preeminent method to train the mind to achieve a desirable state of mental quietude. Meditative writing, a single pointed concentration of mental activity, induces an altered state of consciousness. Writing is studious rumination, a means to converse with our personal muse. Writing entails a period of forced solitude that enables us to meet and conduct a searching conversation with our authentic self. This contemplative dialogue with our true self is transformational. Writing is not a mere act but a journey of the mind into heretofore-unknown frontiers of the self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The fact is, inner peace isn't something that comes when you finally paint the whole house a nice shade of cream and start drinking herbal tea. Inner peace is something that is shaped by the wisdom that 'this too shall pass' and is fired in the kiln of self-knowledge...

~ Tania Ahsan

No matter how strange things get, know that with every breath, you are becoming that which you have always been.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Know yourself fearlessly (even quietly) for all the things you are.

~ Aberjhani

Knowing yourself means being aware of your potential and trusting that you are always growing into it.

~ Michael Thomas Sunnarborg

​Through ignorance a common man considers his own religion to be the best and makes much useless claims, but when his mind is illuminated by Self-Knowledge, all sectarian quarrels disappear.

~ Abhijit Naskar

First know the Self and then talk of social reformation.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

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.

~ John Williams

There are some people who through hurts do not feel they are good enough and this is a destroyer of their self-images. As a true believer of your dream, you need to see yourself as God sees you. God sees you as his own handiwork and that is pretty great to carry you through!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

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.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy— at the time, not afterwards. Most people don’t realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.

~ Paul Theroux