Quotes about self-knowledge

Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place.

Whoever consults the light within himself (it is within everyone) excels at judging the object this light illumines.

To descend into ourselves, we must first lift ourselves up.

Enter oneself (we say). When one enters oneself, one sees God.

To know: it is to see inside oneself.

One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.

When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.

It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself.

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.

Did you ever think that these three men [ Freud, Adler and Jung] who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically...Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids?

"You must get to know your personal devil"

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self .... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required .... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.