Knowing Oneself Quotes

[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .

The purpose of life is undoubtedly to know oneself. We cannot do it unless we learn to identify ourselves with all that lives. The sum-total of that life is God.

One must know oneself as one is, not as one wishes to be, which is merely an ideal and therefore fictitious, unreal; it is only that which is that can be transformed, not that which you wish to be.

To engage in a battle, one must know oneself, believe in oneself, and overcome one's own obstacle

Is a little experience too much to pay for learning to know oneself?

Even with limited intelligence, knowing oneself is not as difficult as some say, but to act according to what one has realized about oneself in real life is as difficult as practicing anything else, compared to theory.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

Life is a constant challenge to know oneself.

Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness.

Is it true that one travels in order to know mankind? It is easier to get to know other people at home, but abroad one gets to know oneself.

To know oneself is not necessarily to improve oneself

To know oneself means, among other things, to know oneself qua non-sage: that is, not as a sophos, but as a philo-sophos, someone on the way toward wisdom.

Consciousness is not the ineluctable starting point for self-understanding because there is a difference between being conscious and understanding oneself as a conscious being. The difference is between being in a certain state and knowing oneself to be in a certain state.

To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia.

It is difficult to know oneself, but it isn't easy to paint oneself either.

One is always in the dark about one's own personality. One needs others to get to know oneself.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself.

Life is like a sandwich! Birth as one slice, and death as the other. What you put in-between the slices is up to you. Is your sandwich tasty or sour?

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

How can one learn to know oneself? Never by introspection, rather by action.

Insight occurs when, and to the degree that, one knows oneself.

The greatest wisdom is to get to know oneself.

Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.

It is wisdom to know others. It is enlightenment to know oneself.

To be enlightened is to know oneself and not run away.

What is freedom? It consists in two things: to know each his own limitations and accept them - that is the same thing as to know oneself, and accept oneself as one is, without fear, or envy, or distaste; and to recognise and accept the conditions under which one lives, also without fear or envy, or distaste. When you do this, you shall be free.

Knowing oneself is not so much a question of discovering what is present in one's self, but rather the creation of who one wants to be.

Self-knowledge involves relationship. To know oneself is to study one self in action with another person. Relationship is a process of self evaluation and self revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.

To dance, above all, is to enter into the motions of life. It is an action, a movement, a process. The dance of life is not so much a metaphor as a fact; to dance is to know oneself alone and to celebrate it.

In truth, to know oneself seems to be the hardest of all things. Not only our eye, which observes external objects, does not use the sense of sight upon itself, but even our mind, which contemplates intently another's sin, is slow in the recognition of its own defects.

To know oneself is the first step toward making flow a part of one's entire life. But just as there is no free lunch in the material economy, nothing comes free in the psychic one. If one is not willing to invest psychic energy in the internal reality of consciousness, and instead squanders it in chasing external rewards, one loses mastery of one's life, and ends up becoming a puppet of circumstances.

Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress - or to fail to make progress - toward a given end.

Marriage is not comfortable and harmonious. Rather it is a place of individuation where a person rubs up against oneself and against the partner, bumps up against the person in love and in rejection, and in this fashion learns to know oneself, the world, good and evil, the heights and the depths.

It is truly strange how long it takes to get to know oneself. I am now sixty two years old, yet just one moment ago I realised that I absolutely love lightly toasted bread. Simultaneously, I also realised that I loathe bread when it is heavily toasted. For almost sixty years, and quite unconsciously, I have been experiencing inner joy or total despair at my relationship with grilled bread.

Thus one should know oneself to be of the nature of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss[Sat-Chit-Ananda].

It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.

Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

I ought to respect myself for my friends' sake, and my children's. It is time, at fifty-six, to begin, at least, to know oneself, - and I do know what I am not, and your regard for me has at least awakened me to believe in the possibility that I may yet make some impression with my "light" - my "dews" - my "breezes" - my bloom and freshness, - no one of which qualities has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.

Know the enemy and know yourself.

I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself.

There's this idea that artists are free and that means that we can do whatever we want to do. And it's very important to engage with this idea, just as human beings, that we are free to do what we wanna do. So the real question becomes, then, what do we wanna do? And as one gets to know oneself, one finds that there are things that return again and again that you wanna do.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action, which is relationship.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.