Best Self Knowledge Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“He began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, 'Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.”

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.”

“Sooner or later on this journey, every traveller faces the same question: Are you a human intending to be a god, or a god pretending to be human?”

“Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.”

“To know yourself, spend a season with something that cannot flatter you.”

“But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory--humorous, poignant, humane allegory--disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.”

“Whoever wants the "I" to yield up its mysterious and tremendous secret must stop it from looking perpetually in the mirror, must stop the little ego's fascination with its own image.”

“Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.”

“The greater the gap between self perception and reality, the more aggression is unleashed on those who point out the discrepancy.”

“Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

“I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself.”

“Ask not of things to shed their veils. Unveil yourselves, and things will be unveiled.”

“We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant. But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point, and after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance, so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite--such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the god.”

“Those who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable.”

“I refuse to let the standards of evil people chip away at my capacity for integrity.”

“Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism.”

“The tombstone over the grave of the conscience always reads: "Human Nature".”

“Knowledge can be acquired by a suitable and complete study, no matter what the starting point is. Only one must know how to 'learn.' What is nearest to us is man; and you are the nearest of all men to yourself. Begin with the study of yourself; remember the saying 'Know thyself.”

“Excuses are a promise of repetition.”

“The three most important words in a relationship are not, 'I love you,' but, 'Tell me more.”

“Baseless victimhood is usually the last stage before outright aggression.”

“We may not yet know the right way to go, but we should at least stop going in the wrong direction.”

“Sanity is not about confrontation. It's about filtering. Having a stable and happy life is about saying "no" to crazy people, not about inviting them in and then hoping that confrontations are going to make them sane.”

“Irrational expectations are at the root of most human suffering.”

“What we do not confront, we inhabit.”

“There is no key to open the heart of another - except curiosity.”

“The things that pose the greatest threats to your survival are the most real things.”

“To be yourself is in many ways to be inconvenient to others. Only placaters and appeasers get along with other people all the time and that's not really getting along with anyone. That's just self erasure.”

“Unless we learn to know ourselves, we run the danger of destroying ourselves.”

“SCREW CHILDREN!”