Self-Ignorance Quotes

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.

No one knows what he himself is made of, except his own spirit within him, yet there is still some part of him which remains hidden even from his own spirit; but you, Lord, know everything about a human being because you have made him...Let me, then, confess what I know about myself, and confess too what I do not know, because what I know of myself I know only because you shed light on me, and what I do not know I shall remain ignorant about until my darkness becomes like bright noon before your face.

The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.

Living artificially in towns, we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves.

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

We should not be upset that others hide the truth from us, when we hide it so often from ourselves

Pride is a vice, which pride itself inclines every man to find in others, and to overlook in himself

One does not know - cannot know - the best that is in one.

Death falls heavily on that man who, known too well to others, dies in ignorance of himself.

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

I barley read stuff about myself. Even when I see some article about myself in a paper or a magazine, nine out of 10 times, I skip it.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

No one is so terribly deceived as he who does not himself suspect it.

Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; 'tis in us, and planted in our bowels; and the mere fact that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick, renders us more hard to be cured.

Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway.

The things you're closest to are often the things you know least about.

Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves.

If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.

I know everything except myself.

In other living creatures the ignorance of themselves is nature, but in men it is a vice.

People don't know anything about themselves because they're all worried about everybody else.

I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.