|
| Navigation: Famous Quotes and Authors - Self-Knowledge Quotes |
|
|
|
Self-Knowledge Quotes and Quotations
 To pursue yourself is an interesting and absorbing thing to do. Once you have caught the scent of a hidden being, your own hidden being, you won't readily be deflected from the tracking down of it.  Ninety percent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves. If I could know me, I could know the universe. A man who knows he is a fool is not a great fool. I believe that in our constant search for security we can never gain any peace of mind until we are secure in our own soul. We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one's own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one's ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one's subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth. Femininity appears to be one of those pivotal qualities that is so important no one can define it. I knew what my job was; it was to go out and meet the people and love them. People who concentrate on giving good service always get more personal satisfaction as well as better business. How can we get better service? One way is by trying to see ourselves as others do. Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery. Let us remember that within us there is a palace of immense magnificence. Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. Freedom is knowing who you really are. If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. To understand is to forgive, even oneself. Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment. - Lao-Tzu I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards becoming a champion. The life which is unexamined is not worth living. - Plato The deeper interior you have the more you have in your library. Follow your interests, get the best available education and training, set your sights high, be persistent, be flexible, keep your options open, accept help when offered, and be prepared to help others. It's all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you're properly trained. As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it. Saying "yes" to yourself means acknowledging what you have that's good and working on the things that aren't. There is no good reason why we should not develop and change until the last day we live. We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts. As simple as it sounds, we all must try to be the best person we can: by making the best choices, by making the most of the talents we've been given. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. You must love and care for yourself, because that's when the best comes out. 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. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself-in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience. Self-knowledge is the beginning of self-improvement. We are the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then. Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be. When a man begins to understand himself, he begins to live. A humble knowledge of oneself is a surer road to God than a deep searching of the sciences. If you do not ask yourself what it is you know, you will go on listening to others and change will not come because you will not hear your own truth. No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself. Sometimes a person has to go back, really back-to have a sense, an understanding of all that's gone to make them-before they can go forward. Awakening begins when a man realizes that he is going nowhere and does not know where to go. Self-searching is the means by which we bring new vision, action, and grace to bear upon the dark and negative side of our natures. With it comes the development of that kind of humility that makes it possible for us to receive God's help. ... We find that bit by bit we can discard the old life-the one that did not work-for a new life that can and does work under conditions whatever. The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself. - Thales You never find yourself until you face the truth. It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient, too. Long ago I understood that it wasn't merely my being a woman that was preventing my being welcomed into the world of what I long thought of as my peers. It was that I had succeeded in an undertaking few men have even attempted: I have become myself. He knows the universe and does not know himself. There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud. No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. Nothing is easier than self-deceit. Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. Learn what you are, and be such. - Pindar Long tresses down to the floor can be beautiful, if you have that, but learn to love what you have. I am no longer what I was. I will remain what I have become. I always introduce myself as an encyclopedia of defects which I do not deny. Why should I? It took me a whole life to build myself as I am. The happy man is he who knows his limitations, yet bows to no false gods. I shall be an autocrat, that's my trade; and the good Lord will forgive me, that's his. Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can. Somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision. Self-understanding rather than self-condemnation is the way to inner peace and mature conscience. To say something nice about themselves, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. After my screen test, the director clapped his hands gleefully and yelled, "She can't talk! She can't act! She's sensational!" Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters. It's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous, but rather the studious way we try to hide them, and our desire to act as if they did not exist. Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows that they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest. A woman of mystique is fully aware of her flaws and weaknesses, yet she is strong enough to admit them and not be embarrassed by them. Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers. Your thorns are the best part of you. Oh, I'm so inadequate. And I love myself! - Meg Ryan I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy, and driven. If your head tells you one thing and your heart tells you another, before you do anything, you should first decide whether you have a better head or a better heart. I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water. - Amy Tan The precept, "Know yourself," was not solely intended to obviate the pride of mankind; but likewise that we might understand our own worth. - Cicero I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them. It is a purely relative matter where one draws the plimsoll-line of condemnation, and ... if you find the whole of humanity falls below it you have simply made a mistake and drawn it too high. And you are probably below it yourself. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little ... oh, I admit only a very little ... of what life is about. The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation. We do not make beams from the hollow, decaying trunk of the fallen oak. We use the upsoaring tree in the full vigor of its sap. We must use what we have to invent what we desire. Whatever glory belongs to the race for a development unprecedented in history for the given length of time, a full share belongs to the womanhood of the race. There is a potential heroine in every woman. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, the pride. The sexes in each species of beings . . . are always true equivalents-equals but not identicals. For women there are, undoubtedly, great difficulties in the path, but so much the more to overcome. First no woman would say "I am but a woman!" But a woman! What more can you ask to be? Ability is sexless. We bear the world and we make it.... There was never a great man who had not a great mother-it is hardly an exaggeration. Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels. There may be ways in which we can work for change. We don't have to do dramatic things or devote our entire lives to it. We can lead normal lives but at the same time try hard not to be bystanders. Some people give time, some money, some their skills and connections, some literally give their life's blood . . . but everyone has something to give. Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity. I was once the typical daughter, then the easily recognizable wife, and then the quintessential mother. I seem always to have reminded people of someone in their family. Perhaps I am just the triumph of Plain Jane. God wastes nothing. To be a housewife is ... a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes ungrateful job if it's looked on as only a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently, or the world will be lost indeed. It's this no-nonsense side of women that is pleasant to deal with. They are the real sportsmen. Not being beautiful was the true blessing. ... Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources. The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome. There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore. The surest sign of fitness is success. From the first, I made my learning, what little it was, useful every way I could. I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can't buy love. I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes. I am not a glutton-I am an explorer of food. I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body. To know oneself, one should assert oneself. I am because my little dog knows me. There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within. More inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self. Whether it was work, marriage, or family, I've always been a late bloomer. Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world-making the most of one's best. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming. Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self. The delights of self-discovery are always available. Whether there are innately female leadership styles ... is not really the right question. It is more important to ask why there has been so little attention paid to women leaders over the years as well as why the styles of leading more often exhibited by women are particularly useful at this critical moment in history. In other living creatures the ignorance of themselves is nature, but in men it is a vice. - Boethius Once, power was considered a masculine attribute. In fact, power has no sex. It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want, and what I fear. Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety. A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. No one can figure out your worth but you. There is no disappointment we endure one-half so great as what we are to ourselves. He who knows himself best esteems himself least. Thales was asked what was most difficult to man; he answered: "To know one's self." - Diogenes Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, And foolish notion. We know what we are, but know not what we may be. 
|
|
| The Quotes on this website are the property of their respective authors. All information has been reproduced on this website for informational and educational purposes only. Copyright © 2011 Famous Quotes and Authors.com. All Rights Reserved. |
