Quotes About Self-knowledge

Female sexual pleasure, rightly understood, is not just about sexuality, or just about pleasure. It serves, also, as a medium of female self-knowledge and hopefulness; female creativity and courage; female focus and initiative; female bliss and transcendence; and as medium of a sensibility that feels very much like freedom. To understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain, but is also, essentially, part of the female soul. — NAOMI WOLF

For example, if (as Dawkins argues) deceit is fundamental in animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of self-knowledge—the deception being practiced.

I am who I am at any given moment…. That's the only way you can know me.

Man is a wonder to himself; he can neither govern nor know himself.

If man should commence by studying himself, he would see how impossible it is to go further.

When all is said, a man's final judgment of his fellows must be based upon his knowledge of himself

No man can teach another self-knowledge. He can only lead him or her up to self-discovery - the source of truth.

Nobody knows you better than you do.

Characterization requires self-knowledge, insight into human nature . . . it is more than impersonation.

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power.

Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality. There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.

Right now I would submit that lack of self-knowledge is an existential risk. An inability to act with global intent and consideration of multigenerational timescales is an existential risk.

It offers neither facts nor power, but for lovers of self-knowledge, of wisdom—if there be such—it seems to be the right book.... Let it go forth into the world for the benefit of those who can discern its meaning.

Health doesn't analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.

I think that you have to do everything you can do to empower girls when they are young, from their education, to their successful independence, to their sexual self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge, I guess, is hard. But I think pain is harder, personally. I think to be hopeless is very hard. I think to die without hope or to live without hope is very hard.

But to discover one's own worldview is much more valuable. In fact, it is a significant step toward self-awareness, self-knowledge and self-understanding.

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

We Each Know Ourselves Better Than Anyone Else Can.

329 A maxim which he frequently repeats is, that the knowledge of ourselves is the necessary and only step by which we can ascend to the knowledge and love of God.

You gotta question the purpose you serve for those who invite themselves into your life. Learn who you are and always question the motive. No one knows you the way you do.

God was consistent in working through one man to reveal himself everywhere, as well as through the other parts of His creation, so that nothing was left devoid of his Divinity and his self-knowledge…so that 'the whole universe was filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters fill the sea.

Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully—people still remarked—was nobody's fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application—that at sixty, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable—all of which he stubbornly confused with independence.

Self-knowledge is not clarity or transparency or knowing how everything works, self-knowledge is a fiercely attentive form of humility and thankfulness, a sense of the privilege of a particular form of participation, coming to know the way we hold the conversation of life and perhaps, above all, the miracle that there is a particular something rather than an abstracted nothing and we are a very particular part of that particular something.