Self Knowledge Quotes

With or without our knowledge, we are all alchemists.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Unless we understand how the twists and turns of life operate to make us, we cannot comprehend who and what we are. Without self-awareness, we are blind to registering the intertexture of other people’s inner life. Gracefully enduring personal hardships expands our minds to extend sympathy and empathy for other people. By casting our personal life experiences into a supple storytelling casing, we create the translucent membrane that quarters the fusion of our flesh, nerves, blood, and bones. Self-understanding is an essential step in loving the entire world.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When you build a relationship with your inner self, you will never be alone.

~ Debasish Mridha

We must each achieve greater individual consciousness and self-knowledge, and project mindful kindness toward everything and everyone.

~ Bryant Mcgill

As I think of myself, so I shall be.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same nostalgia (Álvaro de Campos)

~ Fernando Pessoa

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.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

All money does with an empty heart is allow you to be miserable in style.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Writing about the self to spur intellectual growth or attain a teardrop of emotional salvation is akin to a fish attempting to construct a net that will capture itself.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Perception of a self is not simply about actuality. Human beings’ identities are self-generating and people constantly revise and recreate the story of their being. Coming-into-being, not being, is the highest expression of reality. We only attain the fullest knowledge of a living thing including ourselves when we know what it was, understand what it now is, and understand what it can become. We do not know the truth of a living thing’s existence until we discern its entire history from development to demise.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

All philosophical and inquisitive men share doubts, experience dread, endure pain, and suffer loneliness. The thinking man accepts that the quest is as much a part of life’s adventure as the final destination. The journey we take is as critical to experiencing a meaningful existence as is our actual arrival at the sought after objective. Whether we successfully arrive at our sought after designation, is only part of the equation. The ultimate objective is not reaching some point on the faraway hills, but gaining self-knowledge and increasing self-awareness on the long trek through time.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Experience has taught me that there are some situations in which it's better to keep quiet. That is, I tried to keep quiet. Life gives me good advice, but sometimes I refuse to take it.

~ Etgar Keret

Writing is an exemplary means to make contact with the whole of the self. What ultimately makes up the self is a collation of personal knowledge derived from physical, mental, and emotional experiences. The only way to divine the self is to understand what comprises its constituent components. The self is what we do, think, and act. Writing is not merely a documenter of the actions of the self. Writing, similar to other artistic activities, is one of the fundamental activities that a self can perform.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Self-questioning – an effort to get in touch with our essential self – is an endless stream of thought.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We discover part of our true self only by conspicuous inspection of the depths of our conscience.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A newcomer to a city should first look for a suitable room for resting at night. After securing the room and keeping the luggage there, he or she may go out for sightseeing. Otherwise it'll be a lot of suffering to find a place to rest in the darkness of the night. Similarly, upon securing the eternal resting place in Self, one can freely roam around doing his or her daily works.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself--he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice.

~ Kevin Brockmeier

Your relationship to yourself is and always will be directly reflected in all your relationships with others.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing – to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos – of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings – in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, 'This is I!

~ Conrad Aiken

You are here on earth to unearth who on earth you are.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

G. I. Gurdieff, Beelzebub's Tales to His GrandsonSo-and-so-and-so-must-be; do-not-do-what-must-not-be. Mullah's favorite saying. p. 598

~ Gurdieff

Perfection itself is not the ultimate goalbut the ultimate condition of life.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

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.

~ Nathaniel Branden

If you know who you are, you do not need to consider yourself to be worse or better than someone else

~ Sunday Adelaja

I don't know why, but people seem to be fascinated to learn how some members of society fall through the cracks. I think it's partly that feeling that... it could happen to anyone. But I think it also makes people feel better about their own lives. It makes them think, 'Well, I may think my life is bad, but it could be worse, I could be that poor sod.

~ James Bowen

That tide of insecurity would come in and out over the years, sometimes stranding me for a while but occasionally lifting me just beyond what I thought I could accomplish. Either way, it would wash over the same bedrock certainty: ultimately, I know myself. At each stage of my life, I've had a pretty clear notion of my needs and of what I was ready for.

~ Sonia Sotomayor

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

~ Alain De Botton

You are not who you think you are. You are not your fears, your thoughts, or your body. You are not your insecurities, your career, or your memories. You're not what you're criticized for and you're not what you're praised for. You are a boundless wealth of potential. You are everything that's ever been. Don't sell yourself short. Every sunset, every mountain, every river, every passionate crowd, every concert, every drop of rain - that's you. So go find yourself. Go find your strength, find your beauty, find your purpose. Stop crafting your mask. Stop hiding. Stop lying to yourself and letting people lie to you. You're not lacking in anything except awareness. Everything you've ever wanted is already there, awaiting your attention, awaiting your time.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Life is a conversation with yourself. And who are you if not the eternal presence behind everything that is, was, and will be? Like this, the blow of each breeze and the beauty of each sunset can teach you about yourself, if you listen. If you hear.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

When you discover your own self, you will see that same infinite potential in your lover’s eyes.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Who can see inside the deepest recesses of your imagination and manifest those wishes into your daily experience? Who can appreciate those subtle nuances of character you've acquired by overcoming your deepest fears? Who can truly respect those things that are no longer a part of you because of all your work to release them? Who can see the strength left behind in the wake of your unique struggles and obstacles? Who will see you for who you are, appreciating everything that is there, everything that is not, everything that can be, if you do not? Who else can?

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Writing allows a person to explore both physical reality and the internal workings of their mind. Writing places us in touch with our unconsciousness. Writing purposefully, applying the white heat of self-examination, can act to transform oneself. Writing allows a person with sufficient resolve to anneal their basic constitution, make their mind more flexible.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing is an exhausting and demoralizing task that destroys human conceits. Writing an elongated series of personal essay opens a person’s mind to explore paradoxes and discover previously unrealized personal truths. Writing is as arduous as any trek into the wilderness. Every sentence takes a writer deeper into the jungle of the mind, a world of frightening inconsistencies created by our waking life’s desire that the world of chaos conform to our convenience.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

~ Mark Slouka

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am -- not stuck in the middle, but hovering above the entire farcical spectrum, weeping as I behold my fellow man's devotion to political illusion and self-destruction.

~ Robert Higgs

When we teach people that suspending moral judgments is a virtue, the necessary outcome is moral horror.

~ Peter Boghossian

In absence of consciousness, human beings would merely be animated material objects. Without the synergistic impact of consciousness, free will, and perception of a cohesive self, which act to direct human conduct, many of the qualities that we associate with our humanness would be moot or superfluous delusions including laughter and pain, memories and thoughts, love and anger, imagination and dreams. Without consciousness and free will, humankind would lack the ability to choose right from wrong and there could be no mental discipline directing each person’s lifestyle, attitudes, and belief systems.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Sooner or later on this journey, every traveller faces the same question: Are you a human intending to be a god, or a god pretending to be human?

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

To realize that you do not understand is a virtue, not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.

~ Lao Tzu

I think the need to believe in religion is and always was a need to know.Satisfying the NEED TO KNOW, be it by really knowing, by thinking we know or by believing we know, is very comforting for man.Be it by “direct” knowledge,Be it by “emotional” knowledge,Be it by “gut-felt” knowledge,Be it by “spiritual” knowledge,Be it by “transcendental” knowledge,Be it by “meditative” knowledge,Be it by “inspiration”,Be it by “revelation”,Be it knowing by faith orBe it by understanding,We definitely are one humanity under “need to know”.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian