Voltaire Quotes

'What am I missing?' is a much more important question than 'How cool am I?'

We can’t be what we don’t know.

We have to have a very clear understanding of ourselves.

Knowing what I don't know helps me every day.

Self-awareness is something that we actually actively avoid.

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world. Yet from this lesson thou will learn to avoid the frog's foolish ambition of swelling to rival the bigness of the ox.

but if I've learned anything, it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

The Beginning of Philosophy is a Consciousness of your own Weakness and inability in necessary things.

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

I wish I had been more self-aware earlier, but I think that just comes with age.

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

We have to really educate ourselves in a way about who we are, what our real identity is.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'

A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance.

The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.

The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

I've just tried to keep my eyes open, tried to read everything you can, and tried to see whether I see myself within it. If I do, then I can get excited about it.

Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Know thyself.

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.