Dan Simmons Quotes

For it is easy to criticize and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes a lifetime.

I have never dissected my personal life. What sense would it make?

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.

I always write to understand my place in the world. I can see myself and my life unfold on the page, and I can understand my strengths, my weaknesses - I can see where I need to step up a bit.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

I try to say something about the human condition whenever I can when I'm lucky.

Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man in his endowment with personal capacities.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.

Know thyself.

We can't see ourselves very clearly. This I learned as a songwriter. I'm forever trying to figure out what my own truth is.

To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.

The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.

Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

On the Road that I have taken, one day walking I awaken, amazed to see where I've come, where I'm going, where I'm from.

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

The greatest blessing is that, within all of this, I've still been challenged every day to question and show who I am.

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend

The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practised, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good. . . . God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.

We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.

whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion.

How can we know ourselves? Never by reflection, but only through action. Begin at once to do your duty and immediately you will know what is inside you.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding — a thing which is rather surmised and never spoken than known and clothed in words.