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.
Know thyself, and thou shalt know God.
The knowledge of self is the most important thing, because how are you going to know God if you don't know yourself? How are you going to know anything if you don't know yourself?
Self-knowledge is an anchor that makes unpredictability tolerable.
A man's got to know his limitations.
It's been a growth process for each of us to understand why we find certain things beautiful. And if we do find something beautiful, we'll chase it, because you want to understand yourself and what your psyche is creating.
I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.
A person's strength is to know their weaknesses.
All I know is what I've lived through, so this is what I know.
You wait a lifetime to meet someone who understands you, accepts you as you are. At the end, you find that someone, all along, has been you.
Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.
I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?
There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.
I think it's going to take my whole life to sort of get people to know what my perspective is.
I think we are a product of all our experiences.
I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.
Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives.
I cannot count the good people I know who to my mind would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.
How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
The self- explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.
The only reason we write - well, the only reason why I write; maybe I shouldn't generalize - is so that I can find out something about myself. Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. I have to understand my ancestors - my father, his mother and her mother - to understand who I am. It all leads back to the narcissistic pleasure of discovering yourself.
We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.
I think we're all mysteries to ourselves.
Show me one man who knows his own heart, to him I shall belong.
