Best 257 quotes in «self knowledge quotes» category

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

True wealth is having your health, and knowledge of self.

What I'm now discovering - and I'm now in another decade - is that the older I get the more I have my self knowledge which makes me feel more sexy.

Adversity does not just introduce a man to himself. It also introduces, to him, his family, his friends, and his partner.

All life-forms are innocent, but man is the greatest innocent life-form that the universe has ever produced. Man is never created bad, as some primitive “revelations” claim. Man is both all-capable, and innocent; Man cannot have better attributes than the ones he already has. Once we defeat scarcity, the factor that has forced all our negative attributes into existence will be no more. Man’s nature is forged by scarcity. Man is a child of scarcity. Some men may currently live in abundance, even obscene abundance, but they still are the children of scarcity. We all are.

Self knowledge is the beginning of self improvement.

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.

Wouldn't have no knowledge of wealth, without no knowledge of self.

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.

All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibility-- that is, the experience of being seen and understood.

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.

an axiom of sorcery: If you come to know yourself no one else can know you

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.

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.

A person without her or his own truth ain't a person at all, Ida said. Anybody who tells you different—is a jackass, and no longer deserves to be called human being.

Answer all the questions. Question all the answers.

A person who doesn’t understand flowers might tug on them to make them grow. A person who doesn’t speak the language of someplace might misread the locals’ sentiments and intentions. Yet you are already such a flower, and your inner locals—your emotions, your body, your thoughts—are already speaking to you. If you don’t learn the language of your experience, then how can you understand yourself? How can you help yourself?

But experience isn't something you go and get--it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience;" whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing. I invite you to meditate on a pair of sisters, Emily and Charlotte. Their life experience was an isolated vicarage in a small, dreary English village, a couple of bad years at a girls' school, another year or two in Brussels, which is surely the dullest city in all Europe, and a lot of housework. Out of that seething Mmass of raw, brutal, gutsy Experience they made two of the greatest novels ever written: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. ... They knew their own souls, they knew their own minds and hearts; it was not a knowledge lightly or easily gained.

Are you indoctrinated? Think of anything you believe in be it religious or social, like economic systems or systems of government, etc., and think if you had ALL the information about what you believe in, and ALL the information about all the other/rival systems, and remember if you chose to adopt the one or the other by critical thinking or objective reasoning… No? …

As I think of myself, so I shall be.

At thirty a man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan; At fifty chides his infamous delay, Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve; In all the magnanimity of thought Resolves; and re-resolves; then dies the same.

Az önismeret a legjobb dolog a világon. Arra tanít, hgoy vállaljunk teljes felelősséget önmagunkért, mert így találunk rá a szabadságunkra. Ahelyett, hogy kívül keressük az üdvösséget, magunkban leljük meg azt. Önök is követhetik a példánkat. Az emberek többsége nem tudja, hogyan változzon vagy bocsásson meg, hogyan legyen őszinte. Ilyenkor valamiféle mintára várnak. Nos, ön is ilyen példa lehet. Ön saját maga egyetlen reménysége, s mások is csak azután változnak meg, ha önnek sikerült. Az a dolgunk, hogy a lehető legkeményebben zaklassuk önt, hogy felháborodjon, bedühödjön, vagy undorodjon, mígnem végül megérti, miről van szó. Mérhetetlenül szeretjük önt, akár tudatában vagyunk ennek, akár nem. Az egész világ ön körül forog.

Be able to define yourself at all times. Do not wait for someone else to come and define you. Accept and embrace your individuality. Be inspired to be the BEST YOU and never let no one get your self esteem down.

At that moment, when the world around him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy despair, but he was more firmly himself than ever. That was the last shudder of his awakening, the last pains of birth. Immediately he moved on again and began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homewards, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards.

Baseless victimhood is usually the last stage before outright aggression.

Being aware of who you are, you will ensure that you do not waste your time spending energy on unnecessary things

Being happy where you are does not mean that you must unquestioningly accept parts of your environment that don't serve you. Where you are is inside of this amazing body, this beautiful moment, this capable mind. Where you are is inside of an eternal opportunity. And sometimes you need to change your environment to remember that.

But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory--humorous, poignant, humane allegory--disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.

Dharma (function or properties) of the mind, dharma of the intellect, dharma of the chit, dharma of the ego – when all these dharma and the dharma of the Self (Soul) come into their own dharma (functions); that is known as Gnan (Knowledge of Self). And if we (self) insist upon any one’s dharma; it becomes ignorance (agnan).

Consciousness cannot be glimpsed as though it were something outside yourself, because it is you.

Compassion without discipline is egregious self-sabotage.

Dear young woman, do not place your sense of beauty and self worth, upon the plastic pedestal called "what other people say to you", "what other people think about your photo", "how many 'likes' your pictures get", "how many guys tell you that you look sexy", "how skinny can you be?". A plastic pedestal that is but the dismal shadow of the real one. Dear young woman, place your sense of self worth and beauty upon the Roman marble pedestal that will exist even when all other people are no longer there. If you were the very last person on this planet, you should still be able to know within your heart that you are worthy, you are beautiful, you are wanted. Even if you become the very last person on Earth, you should be fully wanted. Want yourself. Know yourself. See yourself as beautiful, see yourself as worthy.

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

Difficulties of life are valuable opportunities for self-discovery.

Dismantle your wounds so you stop living your life by them.

Do not limit yourself to your own preconceptions of yourself, but throw yourself out onto a blank page that you haven't written on yet, and see what you find out about you, see what story unfolds, see what happens! I always do this, and sometimes it can be very frightening! To very often have a blank page with nothing written on it yet! I feel as though I am a soul with a single covering–my body of skin– and that's the only thing between me on the inside and the rest of the world! It's quite frightening to begin each day on a blank page, forgetting your own preconceptions of yourself and allowing your mind to embrace the new! It is like meeting yourself for the first time, over and over again!

Don’t ever feel bad for making a decision about your own life that upsets other people. You are not responsible for their happiness. You’re responsible for your own happiness. Anyone who wants you to live in misery for their happiness should not be in your life anyway.

Excuses are a promise of repetition.

Dreams are an insight into our psychology: they are what we are, but stripped of the conventions and norms of psychology, and the rules of the physical world…

Everything is music for the born musician.

Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism.

Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

Every bit of pain can be a blessing if we choose to listen to its message.

Family is always a mirror. You can hide from other people, you can even hide from yourself, but your family is going to reflect what you’re doing right back at you.

Funny how in a material world full of pundits and economists obsessed with assets and liabilities -personally, economically and globally - few speak about the greatest of all these…YOU.

Fathom your motivation so that you understand what you are prepared to do and why.

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!

For the most part, people strenuously resist any redefinition of morality, because it shakes them to the very core of their being to think that in pursuing virtue they may have been feeding vice, or in fighting vice they may have in fact been fighting virtue.

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.

Genuine self esteem – please understand this – genuine self esteem is not competitive or comparative. Genuine self esteem isn’t expressed by self-glorification at the expense of others, or by trying to make yourself superior to everyone else, or diminishing others in order to elevate yourself. Arrogance, boastfulness, the overestimation of your abilities, reflect low self esteem, even though we’re often encouraged to believe the opposite. In human beings, joy in the simple fact of existence is a core meaning of healthy self esteem. Thus understood, how can you possibly have too much of it?