Self Knowledge Quotes

Some girls have to go to college to discover what they are good at, some are born doing what they must without even truly knowing why. I felt a hole in my heart shaped like a dark door I needed to guard.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Answer all the questions. Question all the answers.

~ Laurie Gray

If he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.

~ Charles Olson

My species should know the following about itself:-The universe created the ultimate abstract life-form by creating man, but scarcity “programmed” him to this current, ridiculously diminished version of himself.-Everyone and every community (clan) is everybody’s and every community’s future ally and brother in arms in what will be humanity’s decisive stand against scarcity, whether they realize it, desire it, or deny it.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everyone was, especially me.

~ Stephen Chbosky

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.

~ Jane Austen

Commandment #1: Believe in yourself. Commandment #2: Get over yourself.

~ Kristan Higgins

Deep down within the heart there is a stillness which is healing, a trust in the universal laws which is unwavering, and a strength which is rock-like. But because it is so deep we need both patience and perseverance when digging for it.

~ Paul Brunton

How much more infinite a sea is man? Be not so childish as to measure him from head to foot and think you have found his borders.

~ Mikhail Naimy

I saw myself.... In the time I watched, I saw strength—and frailty. Pride and vanity, courage and fear. Of wisdom, a little. Of folly, much. Of intentions, many good ones; but many more left undone. In this, alas, I saw myself a man like any other. But this, too, I saw.... Alike as men may seem, each is different as flakes of snow, no two the same. You told me you had no need to seek the Mirror, knowing you were Annlaw Clay-Shaper. Now I know who I am: myself and none other. I am Taran.

~ Lloyd Alexander

I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Understand that when the beast within yousucceeds again in paralyzing into unendingincompletion whatever you again had the temerity totry to makeits triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of itsrectitude. It knows that it aloneknows you.

~ Frank Bidart

In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light.

~ Nicole Krauss

The one who says he doesn't understand anything about art, doesn't know himself.

~ Jostein Gaarder

He has to come to it on his own.

~ Justin Cronin

What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.

~ Seneca

When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us

~ Alain De Botton

All outdoors may be bedlam, provided there is no disturbance within.

~ Seneca

There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise.

~ Alain De Botton

The immediate result of abandoned idealism is an embittered and drained man, whether he realizes it or not, whether he likes it or not. He is capable of acting in his own interest, but only to the extent that those interests coincide with those of the lowest animals.

~ Mike Klepper

Why has no one come to pry me out of here?- Cersei

~ George R.r. Martin

I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.

~ Frida Kahlo

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge--and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves--how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I want to know who I am before it is too late—before I am no longer the same person—before I become someone different. Although there are days when this seems a furious race against time, there are others when it seems to matter not a tinker's curse.

~ Alan Bradley

There is pleasure in reading a version of myself I know in my heart could never exist, since mine is not an iron mind coldly calculating every possible option and outcome. Instead I am a businessman who loves excitement, loves tension, loves risk and the unexpected, and just happens to possess an extraordinary, on occasion even miraculous, degree of good luck.

~ Jacob Wren

Our spirits rose after a few beers, all that lay between us during the day, the silences that could develop from nowhere, the irritation that could set in, the sudden inability to find areas of common interest, even though there were so many, all of that vanished as our spirits soared and we felt the concomitant warmth: we looked at each other and knew who we were.

~ Knausgaard

Life so far seemed like a kind of dance to him, and he was pleased to discover that he was pretty good at it. Lf there was something hollow underneath it all, a well of fear that sometimes seemed to pull everything else into it and leave him clutching the stone rim for fear of falling into himself, well, that was part of being human, he supposed. That's what the booze was for.

~ Nathan Ballingrud

Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God. Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true sound wisdom consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

~ John Calvin

For all my wanderings, I'm ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is what he is--he can't rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings--Horatio Alger be damned!

~ Norman Lock

If I follow a particular method of knowing myself, then I shall have the result which that system necessitates; but the result will obviously not be the understanding of myself.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

There is a correlation between the severity of a person’s moods and a lack of self-knowledge.

~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

...[T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics. ... Unless this job is done, we will not know whether the answers philosophers give to their questions are a function of the conceptualization built into the questions themselves.

~ George Lakoff

The knowledge of ourselves, therefore, is not only an incitement to seek after God, but likewise a considerable assistance towards finding him.

~ John Calvin

The greatest of empires, is the empire over one's self.

~ Publilius Syrus

How was I to be a scientist, father Lion?' Science is knowing. What could I have known? Others always did the knowing, knew what was in me, what should come out of me, what was best for me. I didn't know who I was, what I wanted. I know less now, and I am afraid.

~ Russell Hoban

I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.

~ Joshua Ferris

Self-Knowledge is the Jewel of all Knowledge.-Serena Jade

~ Serena Jade

The interdependent couple is the new setting and their knowledge of Self is an ancient treasure.-Serena Jade

~ Serena Jade

Learn whom God has ordered you to be, and in what part of human affairs you have been placed.

~ Persius

Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.

~ Richard Rohr