Pema Chodron Quotes

Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

Self-knowledge is an anchor that makes unpredictability tolerable.

Go to you bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

Nothing said to us, nothing we can learn from others, reaches us so deep as that which we find in ourselves.

The true cure for self-righteousness is self-knowledge.

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

Self-knowledge is the great power by which we comprehend and control our lives

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.

I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.

I think over time you learn to know a bit more about yourself - you develop a certain amount of self-insight and self-awareness, and you know what you can absorb, and what you cannot; what gets to you and what doesn't.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.

To know yourself you need not go to any book, to any priest, to any psychologist. The whole treasure is within yourself.

Learn to know yourself... to search realistically and regularly the processes of your own mind and feelings.

Wouldn't have no knowledge of wealth, without no knowledge of self.

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.

Of all literary exercitations, whether designed for the use or entertainment of the world, there are none of so much importance, or so immediately our concern, as those which let us into the knowledge of our own nature. Others may exercise the understanding or amuse the imagination; but these only can improve the heart and form the human mind to wisdom.

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.

Knowing yourself has to always come from within. The outside can inspire or guide you, but knowing has to come from within you.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?

The fundamental law of nature is to not know too much about yourself.

I've done teaching and things like that because if you're acting, you're becoming other human beings, and you need to have time to find who you are as well.

There's so much of our psychological makeup which is impermissible for us to explore because it's inappropriate or perverse or scary. I'm interested in exploring that in myself. I try to be honest with myself about everything that I feel. I'm not saying I'm able to do that all the time, but it's something I'm interested in.