Quotes About Knowing Ourselves

#1. Humility, or poverty of spirit, is not a matter of thinking low thoughts about ourselves. It is not a matter of groveling in the dust. It is simply a matter of knowing ourselves as we really are. And when we see ourselves as we really are, we will see that we are poor.

John W. Miller

#2. We can travel a long way in life and do many things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. it is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home.

Sharon Salzberg

#3. To know God begins with knowing ourselves, our true selves, whom we uncover as we make choices that help us step beyond the influence of the ego.

Peter Santos

#4. Victory becomes, to some degree, a state of mind. Knowing ourselves superior to the anxieties, troubles, and worries which obsess us, we are superior to them.

Basil King

#5. We often end our journeys without beginning them. We learn about the world without knowing ourselves.

Debasish Mridha

#6. Most of us don't spend any time knowing ourselves. We just keep reacting.

Jewel

#7. Part of knowing ourselves is also being able to accept who we are and to value ourselves regardless of our flaws. Accepting who we are allows us to value our worth without conditions or reservations.

Diane Greene

#8. 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.

Pema Chodron

#9. Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.

Plotinus

#10. In knowing ourselves to be unique, we possess the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!

Carl Jung

#11. Let's shift from moralizing about and lamenting divorce to understanding that a successful marriage, no matter the length, is one that contributes to knowing ourselves better and evolving into more loving and compassionate people.

Deb Purdy

#12. There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.

Fernando Pessoa

#13. Knowing ourselves is knowing our worth in the eyes of God. That's why the number one thought we cannot fail to think and believe is that He loves us. Always. No matter what.

Toni Sorenson

#14. As I see it, we shall never succeed in knowing ourselves unless we seek to know God: let

Teresa Of Avila

#15. Cultivating self-love is an odyssey with moments of difficulty and joy. It's an excursion into knowing ourselves, learning to accept and deal with what we discover... and struggling with our fear of allowing in a little madness to set us free.

Bud Harris

#16. We are aspects of Divinity, in the process of knowing ourselves experientially.

Neale Donald Walsch

#17. I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.

Samuel L. Jackson

#18. We are only now on the threshold of knowing the range of the educability of man-the perfectibility of man. We have never addressed ourselves to this problem before.

Jerome Bruner

#19. Do we know ourselves - our "self"? How are we supposed to be ourselves if we are not our selves? And how can we be our selves without knowing who we are, such that we are certain of being the ones we are?

Martin Heidegger

#20. Something deep inside each one of us seeks to prove we are good enough--to our parents, our friends, ourselves, God. We do this because we know deep down that we aren't good enough, and the illusion of feeling like good people feels better than the reality of knowing we are not.

Chris Tomlinson

#21. I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affection for the culture we've created for ourselves: it's too cynical, too knowing, too ironic, too empty of real value and meaning.

Jonathan Coe

#22. How well do we actually know ourselves? Can we dare to say that we really know someone, like really, really know them?

Nico J. Genes

#23. Far too many times in life we throw ourselves
in ships without knowing how stable they
are, or how deep is the water for it to float.

Nomthandazo Tsembeni

#24. Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.

Don Herold

#25. As important as finding the Why behind your Purpose and Goals is knowing the Who. We will often do more and endure more for people we love than we will endure for ourselves. Find your Why and your Who and you will endure and overcome anything.

Tom Cunningham

#26. Much of our suffering is caused by our false perceptions and attachment to mental images. We assume things to be true without really knowing whether they are true or not, then create a world of hurt for ourselves and others.

Joseph P. Kauffman

#27. To know someone, we must experience him, and that knowing will not exceed our self-knowledge - we cannot know someone else to a greater depth than we know ourselves.

Shepherd Hoodwin

#28. We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.

Richard Rohr

#29. We can know nothing of humankind without knowing something of ourselves. Self-knowledge is the property of those people whose passions have their full play, but who ponder over their results.

Benjamin Disraeli

#30. Knowing what we must do is neither fundamental nor difficult, but to comprehend which presumptions and vain prejudices we must rid ourselves of in order to be able to educate our children is most difficult.

Maria Montessori

#31. I have been thinking about the idea of excuses for some time now. They are like menacing demons that creep into our lives without us knowing. They are roadblocks, white lies to ourselves, a reason to set the bar lower, and self-justification for achieving less than our full potential.

Lorii Myers

#32. Our perfection certainly consists in knowing God and ourselves.

Angela Of Foligno

#33. To feel the anguish of waiting for the next moment and of taking part in the complex current (of affairs) not knowing that we are headed toward ourselves, through millions of stone beings - of bird beings - of star beings - of microbe beings - of fountain beings toward ourselves

Frida Kahlo

#34. Questioning ourselves and our country is healthy and essential.

Bryant McGill

#35. We are still focussing too much on gender. If we all just gave ourselves a break, knowing that we could all be everything, we'd feel relieved and more equal.

Gemma Cairney

#36. The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.

Malcolm Gladwell

#37. They're not allowed to talk about it at school and they maybe feel uncomfortable talking about it with their parents. But instead of them not knowing about it, now we have these gadgets and we can learn about it and not tell our parents and get ourselves into potentially dangerous situations.

Sarah Steele

#38. Now, knowing better, we can act better, we can live better, and give the animals, our children and ourselves a true reason for hope and celebration.

Will Tuttle

#39. So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television's potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.

Jim Trelease

#40. Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ, we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.

Blaise Pascal

#41. We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.

Walter Lippmann

#42. So we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it.

J.I. Packer

#43. Knowledge is not the same as morality, but we need to understand if we are to avoid past mistakes and move in productive directions. An important part of that understanding is knowing who we are and what we can do ... Ultimately, we must synthesize our understandings for ourselves.

Howard Gardner

#44. In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today?

Joan Halifax

#45. As God's children, we are to use our lives knowing they reflect back to him and bear his image. Too often, instead of acting like mirrors pointing back to Jesus, we try to act like billboards, advertising ourselves.

Jefferson Bethke

#46. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

C. G. Jung

#47. I reckon the gods laugh many a time to hear us, but what matters so long as we remember that we're only men and don't take to fancying that we're gods ourselves, really, knowing good and evil.

L.M. Montgomery

#48. We were small and thought we knew nothing Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires In the shiny pouches of raindrops, Each one seeded full with the light Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves So infinitesimally scaled We could stream through the eye of a needle.

Seamus Heaney

#49. The Christian life is one of faith, where we find ourselves routinely overdriving our headlights but knowing it's okay because God is in control and has a purpose behind it.

Bill Hybels

#50. There's a great satisfaction in knowing that we've made good use of our days, that we've lived up to our expectations of ourselves.

Gretchen Rubin

#51. There's only the writing, which I admit to knowing very little about. But then it's probably best not to know. It allows one to work without expectation. Best to let the poem do the thinking while we concern ourselves with what's called the personal life.

Russell Edson

#52. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth's Riches knowing - while denying - that we'd be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.

David Mitchell

#53. We've organized ourselves as cultures, to a large degree, around what we agree we know. And when you have multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of organizing, the society loses one of its deepest organizational principles.

David Weinberger

#54. Witchcraft is more than just a practice, it is a way of life. A way of looking at the physical and spiritual as a collaborative source of manifestation.
We are in tune with nature, in tune with ourselves and in alignment with our all-knowing inner witch.

Dacha Avelin

#55. Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves
so how can we know anyone else?

Sydney J. Harris

#56. Without even knowing it ourselves, we were ransomed by the small change in copper that was left from the golden coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#57. For as we forgive, we are forgiven; as we condemn others, we are ourselves condemned. Thus in patience condemn not, neither find fault; not condoning, not agreeing, but let thine own life so shine that others, seeing thy patience, knowing thy understanding, comprehending thy peace, may take hope.

Edgar Cayce

#58. In order to stretch ourselves we do need to experience the vulnerability of not knowing the outcome.

Philippa Perry

#59. The chances we take, knowing no better than to fall or to stand back and hold ourselves in ... protecting our hearts with the tightest of grips.

Sarah Dessen

#60. There is a knowingness that is as much a part of us as flesh and blood and bones. It's intuition, the deepest natural knowing ... Intuition is the voice within forever pressing us to stretch ourselves, to take risks, to keep loving and giving birth to a new self, regardless of circumstances.

Susan L. Taylor

#61. Crazy by definition is
Knowing that true sanity is
A figment of the educated mind

Caleb Warta

#62. In the first day of the Soviet Army's arrival, I and the other comrades were isolated and then found ourselves here, not knowing anything ... I can only conjecture what could have happened.

Alexander Dubcek

#63. The power of getting to know one another is so immense, eclipsed only by first getting to know ourselves.

Bryant McGill

#64. If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man ... ?

Blaise Pascal

#65. TV is gratifying in the long-term. We [writers] find ourselves knowing who we can go to for a laugh, or who we can go to for a good emotional moment, and then milking those things.

Michael Brandt

#66. Joy is our goal, our destiny. We cannot know who we are except in joy. Not knowing joy, we do not know ourselves.

Marianne Williamson

#67. When we practice sacred sexuality we are working with cosmologically rooted principles, balancing the heavenly yang (male energy) of the universe with the all-knowing, life-giving yin (feminine energy) of the earth within ourselves.

John Maxwell Taylor

#68. I guess that from the moment we are fed by our mothers, without even knowing it, we are caught in a net that brings us comfort, something we always feel when a special woman cooks for us. It is something unique and personal - it is something we want to keep for ourselves.

Jose Andres

#69. I believe, or sense, that the universe has not been constructed from a purely mechanical, logical, rational point of view, but there is a magic afoot in the universe, that God can be looked at as a kind of a magician in which we get to perform tricks ourselves, without knowing that we're doing so.

Fred Alan Wolf

#70. When we start organizing, we tend to put tactics before reason. We see a messy space and launch a wild, full frontal assault before we understand the background of the problem and equip ourselves to meet the challenge. This is like going into battle unarmed without knowing our enemy!

Vicki Norris

#71. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Ray Bradbury

#72. The government has no business knowing how much money we make and how we made it. It's none of their business. And that's why I believe that manufacturing is critical. If we can't feed ourselves, fuel ourselves and fight for ourselves, we can't be free.

Mike Huckabee

#73. How frustrating to think you can be lost to yourself. And yet how often it is that a stranger stares back at you from the mirror. Maybe in truth we never see ourselves as clearly as the thousands of eyes that daily take us in.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#74. Taking a step without knowing the end result is the only way we develop faith and not only this, it's a practice that connects us with a power greater than ourselves.

Louise Hay

#75. When we use a language, we should commit ourselves to knowing it, being able to read it, and writing it idiomatically.

Ron Jeffries

#76. We throw ourselves down, as Jesus did, before the mystery of God's power present to us, knowing that the Cross is the true burning bush, the place of the flame of God's love, which burns but does not destroy.

Pope Benedict XVI

#77. We are about to change history, said Saphira.
We're throwing ourselves off a cliff without knowing how deep the water below is.
Ah, but what a glorious flight!
(Eragon to Saphira)

Christopher Paolini

#78. Life is a struggle to elevate ourselves from nobody to somebody, not ever knowing the secret beauties of being nobody!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#79. In a few seconds, we judge another person and think we know them. When, the person we've lived with the longest, we still don't know very well - ourselves.

Charles F. Glassman

#80. We seek to forget ourselves, to be surprised and to do something without knowing how or why. The way of life is wonderful. It is my abandonment.

Rock Peter

#81. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality

Steven D. Levitt

#82. Let's act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are. For we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.

Fernando Pessoa

#83. We never know what is going to happen, do we? Life is always throwing us this way and that. That's where the adventure is. Not knowing where you'll end up or how you'll fare. It's all a mystery, and when we say any different, we're just lying to ourselves. Tell me, when have you felt most alive?

Eowyn Ivey

#84. We can't underestimate the value of silence. We need to create ourselves, need to spend time alone. If you don't, you risk not knowing yourself and not realizing your dreams.

Jewel

#85. Only by a frank discussion of the very details of dying can we best deal with those aspects that frighten us the most. It is by knowing the truth ... that we rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita of death.

Sherwin B. Nuland

#86. It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.'

Zadie Smith

#87. In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton

#88. When some passion or effect is described in a natural style, we find within ourselves the truth of what we hear, without knowing it was there.

Blaise Pascal

#89. We meditate to find, to recover, to come back to something of ourselves we once dimly and unknowingly had and have lost without knowing what it was or where or when we lost it.

Lawrence LeShan

#90. What life is this? Living in a world of hatred and lies, breathing the same air the dead breathed once, knowing we will wake up one day and find ourselves gone from time and space, and yet we still breathe the air without trembling from the thought.

Nour Zikra

#91. How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

Andrew Sean Greer

#92. There is something to be said for people who have to work hard, be creative, produce what they have with little - or no - means. Those of us from poor homes have the advantage of thinking for ourselves and of knowing that when times get hard, things could always be worse.

Beth Ditto

#93. Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing.

Richard Rohr