Quotes about self-knowledge

What you're searching for in others lies within you.

In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls. (p381)

We said nothing for several minutes. Our minds weighed like ripened fruit on the branch. When one is confronted by the mirror, the spirit trembles. (p49)

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.

We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’.

Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found it was ourselves.

The priest didn’t have one of the magic gems stitched into his head though, because he thought that talking to everyone else meant that you never listened to yourself anymore.

No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

The real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.

You don’t alter the past, turn the tide, or change yourself by brooding about your hidden motives. You will surprise yourself every time, anyway. Nobody ever figures out why.

The first step, perhaps, is to take stock. Who are you? When you buy a house and prepare to live in it, you hire an inspector to list all its faults—as it is, in reality, now, not as you wish it could be. You’ll even pay him for the bad news. You need to know. You need to discover the home’s hidden flaws. You need to know whether they are cosmetic imperfections or structural inadequacies. You need to know because you can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken—and you’re broken. You need an inspector. The internal critic—it could play that role, if you could get it on track; if you and it could cooperate.

Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside.