Self-knowledge Quotes

The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind. (F. H. Bradley)
The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge. View quote
F. H. Bradley
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power. View quote
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. View quote
John Taylor Gatto
There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are. View quote
Friedrich Schlegel
I think that you have to do everything you can do to empower girls when they are young, from their education, to their successful independence, to their sexual self-knowledge. View quote
Susie Bright
Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more--also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth. View quote
Andrea Dworkin
The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star. View quote
Carl Sagan
More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure, As tempted more more able to endure, As more exposed to suffering and distress. View quote
William Wordsworth
Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If man puts his honor first in relying upon himself, knowing himself and applying himself, this in self-reliance, self-assertion, and freedom, he then strives to rid himself of the ignorance which makes a strange impenetrable object a barrier and a hindrance to his self-knowledge. (Max Stirner)
Fear is a question What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
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... View quote
Flannery O’Connor
Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them. View quote
Marilyn French
Acting requires a lot of discipline to go with the obsession. It's a path of knowledge, and of self-knowledge. Sometimes you get lost on the path. And then you find yourself again. View quote
Toni Servillo
Without fear of God as a basis, nothing is possible spiritually, for the absence of fear is a lack of self-knowledge. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age. View quote
Friedrich Schlegel
You need both clarity and earnestness for self-knowledge. You need maturity of heart and mind, which comes through earnest application in daily life of whatever little you have understood. (...). View quote
Nisargadatta Maharaj
Desire for embodied existence is the root-cause of trouble. (...) Desire leads to experience. Experience leads to discrimination, detachment, self-knowledge –liberation. And what is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and death. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream. Enquiry also wakes you up. You need not wait for suffering; enquiry into happiness is better, for the mind is in harmony and peace. View quote
Nisargadatta Maharaj
Self-knowledge is only from moment to moment, and therefore there is a creative happiness from moment to moment. View quote
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal? View quote
Emil Cioran
Self-knowledge will reveal the elements of biological human nature from which modern social life proliferated in all its strange forms. View quote
E. O. Wilson
Because of mathematical indeterminancy and the uncertainty principle, it may be a law of nature that no nervous system is capable of acquiring enough knowledge to significantly predict the future of any other intelligent system in detail. Nor can intelligent minds gain enough self-knowledge to know their own future, capture fate, and in this sense eliminate free will. View quote
E. O. Wilson
The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind... To put the conclusion crudely - the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still that is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness... Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be - or rather, it knows itself to be. View quote
Arthur Eddington