Self Knowledge Quotes

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

~ Kahlil Gibran

To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?

~ Pascal Mercier

Those who read books cannot understand the teachings and, what's more, may even go astray. But those who try to observe the things going on in the mind, and always take that which is true in their own minds as their standard, never get muddled. They are able to comprehend suffering, and ultimately will understand Dharma. Then, they will understand the books they read.

~ Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

What we are at this very moment, is determined by the sum total of all our experiences till this moment.

~ Abhijit Naskar

I am metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistences mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

~ Socrates

[I]t doesn’t matter whom you love or where you move from or to, you always take yourself with you. If you don’t know who you are, or if you’ve forgotten or misplaced her, then you’ll always feel as if you don’t belong. Anywhere. (xiii)

~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

~ Meister Eckhart

Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.

~ G.i. Gurdjieff

A fine line exists between quitting on ourselves and letting go of a restrictive position in life and moving forward to reach our ultimate destination based upon our natal predisposition honed by a lifetime of experimentation. Who has not been forced to stop and ask ourselves, ‘who are we,’ ‘what are we doing,’ and ‘where are we going?’ Who has not been forced to pause by life’s dynamic forces and ask ourselves, ‘what mystical chords bind us as a species; what is the meaning of life; and how do we give birth to our genetic blueprint while shaping a sense of purposefulness out of our own existence and striving to bring joy to other people’s hearth?’ To answer these life affirming questions that gnaw most voraciously at our consciousness at the time when tension and unsettling trauma besieges us, we must appreciate our heritage, be mindful our epoch, accept responsibility for our adult decisions, and strive to accumulate wisdom that segues our entrance into the future. Each of us must arrive at a unifying philosophy that guides our living quest, and the sooner we come to terms with our eccentric self the quicker we will perceive and appreciate the ineffable beauty of nature.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We employ our personality, what we know, think, and believe, in order to interpret the world, making self-understanding a critical act because it establishes the baseline for our philosophical and intellectual approach towards life.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

All roads taken lead us only to ourselves.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Narrative writing represents a personal attempt to quantify and understand the psychological singularities behind the author’s personality traits as delineated by winnowed list of formative life experiences.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We gain knowledge about the interworking of our personal mind through observation of the external world and personal introspection. Contemplation requires a degree of stillness, the willingness to consider deep thoughts.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Reading and writing are solitary activities that increase a person’s capacity for concentration, awareness, and conceptual thought as the person weaves immediate information with stored memories.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person can only see their shadow if they awaken their eclectic soul. Self-understanding commences by admitting to the shadowy presence of the primordial unconsciousness. The unconscious mind is a magical concoction of logical and irrational thoughts and feelings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A man who's discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflection.

~ Philip Roth

You have to learn to recognize your own depths.

~ Joseph Campbell

Our inner wisdom is persistent, but quiet. It will always whisper, but it will never stop knocking at your door.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

To persevere is one thing, but to push on ignoring your intuition is something quite different. Self-awareness is the practice of learning the difference.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Would he ever come back? He wondered. The water filled his ears with its own rush, and he was comforted by the realization that, in fact, he never left.

~ Diana Gabaldon

Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature’s nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold.

~ Fredrik Sjöberg

It is not until you learn to look at yourself, through the truth of who you are, that you can look at someone else.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

To stand by yourself -- that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself.

~ Pascal Mercier

When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.

~ Stefan Molyneux

No one knows more about the way you think than you do.

~ Seth Godin

A dragon is a confusion at the heart of things, a law unto himself. He embraces good, evil, and indifference; in his own nature he makes them indivisible and absolute. He knows who he is. Surely you see that... Put it this way. Dragons all love life's finer things- music, art, treasure- the works of the spirit; yet in their personal habits they're foul and bestial- they burn down cathedrals, for instance, and eat maidens- and they see in their whimsical activities no faintest contradiction... Dragons never grow, never change... Believe me, nothing in this world is more despicable than a dragon. They're a walking- or flying- condemnation of all we stand for, all we pray for our children, nay, for ourselves. We struggle to improve ourselves, we tortuously balance on the delicate line between our duties to society and our duties within- our duties to God and our own nature.

~ John Gardner

One last point. Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not when you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

~ C.s. Lewis

One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance 'do the right thing.' Well, as many have discovered, you don't really know what you'll do in the dark till the lights go out.

~ James Carlos Blake

It has always been my contention that an individual who can be relied upon to be himself and to be honest unto himself can be relied upon in every other way.

~ J. Paul Getty

Simple was never that simple. Still, the self-questioning did take some time to reach him. And if there's anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it's self-questioning coming too late.

~ Philip Roth

I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.

~ Janet Frame

I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.

~ Henry David Thoreau

When we own our beliefs, we have clear boundaries. We know what we believe and we know what others believe. There is no confusion. Our identity is strong to us and everyone else.

~ Patty Houser

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the contract to forget, he no longer remembered what he had said to F. three years before. Too bad for him. The memory might have alerted him, might have helped him see that his choice of medicine was wholly theoretical, made without the slightest self- knowledge. Thus he studied medicine for three years before giving up with a sense of shipwreck. What to choose after those lost years? What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? He walked down the broad outside staircase of the medical school for the last time, with the feeling that he was about to find himself alone on a platform all the trains had left.

~ Milan Kundera

What a man finds circa se or sub se is overwhelming in amount, what he finds in se is embarassing in its obscurity, but when from his own being he would obtain light as to what is supra se, then indeed he finds himself face to face with a dark and somewhat terrifying mystery. The trouble is that he is himself involved in the mystery. If, in any true sense, man is an image of God, how should he know himself without knowing God? But if it is really of God that he is an image, how should he know himself?

~ Étienne Gilson

Everything is music for the born musician.

~ Romain Rolland

In wishing to know ourselves fully, we must forget our quest for gain and seek only completion. At a certain point in our development, we no longer even seek to become Mystic, Magister, Sorcerer, or Witch: we seek only our own perfection in the wholeness of our Will, in the joining of light with dark and strength with love. We are varied and gorgeous yet pure of heart. Our aim is this: to know ourselves and to know the world.

~ T. Thorn Coyle

The politeness which she had been brought up to practice as a duty made it impossible for her to escape; while the want of that higher species of self-command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of her own heart, that principle of right which had not formed any essential part of her education, made her miserable under it.

~ Jane Austen

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight. For this purpose I shall examine the consequences of certain economical phenomena, by placing in opposition to each other those which are seen, and those which are not seen.

~ Frédéric Bastiat