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Link Quote Stars Tags Author
99a1ef1 I think it's good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone. self-knowledge being-alone Amy Sedaris
55e210f What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?' 'Cats don't have names,' it said. 'No?' said Coraline. 'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names. self-knowledge names Neil Gaiman
dfa01cc The only person who can pull me down is myself, and I'm not going to let myself pull me down anymore. belief-in-self self-knowledge self-awareness inspiration inspirational-attitude inspirational-life living life inspirational believe-in-yourself self-belief self-love C. JoyBell C.
1cfb447 Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them. self-knowledge inspirational self-improvement Albert Einstein
012f5c2 There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting. self-knowledge personality interesting L.M. Montgomery
864896e I don't fit into any stereotypes. And I like myself that way. stereotypes self-knowledge individuality self-awareness inspirational-attitude inspirational-quotes inspirational fitting-in uniqueness C. JoyBell C.
2e1ec53 If you're not comfortable enough with yourself or with your own truth when entering a relationship, then you're not ready for that relationship. self-knowledge relationship life love truth inspirational Steve Maraboli
1e01b03 We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be. self-knowledge self-trust Jane Austen
f78c190 Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust. self-knowledge love bell hooks
af22bb1 Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you! self-knowledge Frank Herbert
61e9a13 A lot of the conflict you have in your life exists simply because you're not living in alignment; you're not be being true to yourself. self-knowledge true-to-yourself happiness life inspirational authenticity Steve Maraboli
c3975fe [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) self-knowledge self-awareness life love place yourself Sarah Ban Breathnach
0b6f200 Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate. self-knowledge marriage relationships love truth Alain de Botton
bc053a4 Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive- my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. self-knowledge integrity reading social-change isolation Jonathan Franzen
beff74a ...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived. self-knowledge self soul James Hillman
bfaba64 I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations. self-knowledge Terry Tempest Williams
ced9fcb 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. self-knowledge annlaw taran Lloyd Alexander
c869e44 We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire. self-knowledge happiness status possessions anxiety materialism desire Alain de Botton
d8ac446 Je sais qu'on ne peut jamais se connaitre, mais seulement se raconter. self-knowledge Simone de Beauvoir
81d301c Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally; you may endure for a time, but under affliction or persecution your faith will not last. This is why many in this age (and in every age) become infidels, heretics, schismatics, disloyal despisers of the Church. They cast off the form of truth, because it never has been to them more than a form. They endure not, because they never have tasted that the Lord is gracious; and they never have had experience of His power and love, because they have never known their own weakness and need. self-knowledge god god-s-grace heretics infidels the-church John Henry Newman
bc96626 Throughout human history beauty has been seen as a gift from God, but Mom had another notion; she thought that beauty could be earned through self-knowledge. It may be a revolutionary idea, but it has offered me great comfort. self-knowledge Ruth Reichl
abc0cff What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes--for a while, at least--be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. self-knowledge family communicators self-acceptance communication parenting parents children Alain de Botton
e940797 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. self-knowledge Nicole Krauss
2f0c86a 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. self-knowledge metamorphosis Hermann Hesse
4b348df Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives. metaphor self-knowledge illusion freedom reason cognitive-science embodied-mind limitation thought George Lakoff
46fd189 What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it. self-knowledge poetry philosophy Alain de Botton
73225a1 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. metaphor theatre self-knowledge masks perception drama speech George Eliot
9ad3a04 The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves. self-knowledge status priorities materialism Alain de Botton
94c5697 Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly? self-knowledge suffering lucidity Edward St. Aubyn
555a0a8 [P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity. self-knowledge stupidity Jonathan Franzen
8226d2f 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 self-knowledge Alain de Botton
aa885e1 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. self-knowledge humanity standing-out artist Chaim Potok
e173991 Yes it's me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (...) I'm the one here in myself, it's me. (...) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn't--it's all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn't want--all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving--in me it's the same nostalgia (Alvaro de Campos) loneliness self-knowledge life love nostalgia Fernando Pessoa
cae43ee One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy-- at the time, not afterwards. Most people don't realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense. time self-knowledge Paul Theroux
8b99f5c He began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, 'Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. good-and-evil self-knowledge fear death life coming-of-age manhood evil Ursula K. Le Guin
fed2da0 If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. self-knowledge travel sense-of-self James Baldwin
dcf411d The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery. self-knowledge depression self-discovery Andrew Solomon
9fa1bd9 If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind. self-knowledge philosophy science-of-mind human-nature George Lakoff
1accc99 Thinking, he walked ever more slowly and asked himself, What is it now that you were hoping to learn from doctrines and teachers, and what is it that they--who taught you so much--were unable to teach you? And, he decided, It was the Self whose meaning and nature I wished to learn. It was the Self I wished to escape from, wished to overcome. But I was unable to overcome it, I could only trick it, could only run away from it and hide. Truly, not a single thing in all the world has so occupied my thoughts as this Self of mine, this riddle: that I am alive and that I am One, am different and separate from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And there is not a thing in the world about which I know less than about myself, about Siddhartha! self-knowledge uniqueness Hermann Hesse
1afc4c3 They say that to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is fully calculable; even to ourselves we are strange. self-knowledge knowledge-of-self know-thyself Gore Vidal
7d08934 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. self-knowledge Diana Gabaldon
93886a6 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. self-knowledge Russell Hoban
94208a1 The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself--he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice. understanding self-knowledge life self Kevin Brockmeier
2af2952 Please God, whatever I was I am no longer....All is forgotten, if not forgiven--it could have come to that. But I don't trust the thought. I don't know if it's because it would be too easy or too terrible to imagine no one cares anymore. time self-knowledge remorse insignificance memory Tim Winton
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