All Quotes By Tag: Self-knowledge

“There is a magnificent, beautiful, wonderful painting in front of you! It is intricate, detailed, a painstaking labor of devotion and love! The colors are like no other, they swim and leap, they trickle and embellish! And yet you choose to fixate your eyes on the small fly which has landed on it! Why do you do such a thing?”

“I am my own biggest critic. Before anyone else has criticized me, I have already criticized myself. But for the rest of my life, I am going to be with me and I don’t want to spend my life with someone who is always critical. So I am going to stop being my own critic. It’s high time that I accept all the great things about me.”

“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.”

“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?”

“I found power in accepting the truth of who I am. It may not be a truth that others can accept, but I cannot live any other way. How would it be to live a lie every minute of your life.”

“Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.”

“I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do not know what happens there.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”