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179 quotes that mention knowing yourself in so many words. Each one is checked against the book it comes from.
Have no friends not equal to yourself.
When we see men of worth, we should think of equalling them; when we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.
What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us.
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
He who knows other men is discerning; he who knows himself is intelligent.
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.
The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like [the wrong-doer].
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
Physician, heal thyself
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal
This above all: to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Self-love is the greatest of flatterers.
Self love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.
Silence is the best resolve for him who distrusts himself.
It is as easy unwittingly to deceive oneself as to deceive others.
If we never flattered ourselves we should have but scant pleasure.
It is far easier to be wise for others than to be so for oneself.
We sometimes differ more widely from ourselves than we do from others.
A man would rather say evil of himself than say nothing.
As rivers are lost in the sea so are virtues in self.
We easily forget those faults which are known only to ourselves.
Pride will not owe, self-love will not pay.
There is more self-love than love in jealousy.
We only appreciate our good or evil in proportion to our self-love.
Opportunity makes us known to others, but more to ourselves.
Some tears after having deceived others deceive ourselves.
More persons exist without self-love than without envy.
He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously—and even himself—only in relation to his pupils.
Under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself.
He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself thereby, as a despiser.
Who has not, at one time or another—sacrificed himself for the sake of his good name?
A discerning one might easily regard himself at present as the animalization of God.
Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our cleaning ourselves—“justifying” ourselves.
The belly is the reason why man does not so readily take himself for a God.
To talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing oneself.
Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.
A man is not deceived by others, he deceives himself.
To praise a man is to put oneself on his level.
Duty: where a man loves what he commands himself to do.
Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
ABSENTEE, n. A person with an income who has had the forethought to remove himself from the sphere of exaction.
ABSTAINER, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
ACCUSE, v.t. To affirm another’s guilt or unworth; most commonly as a justification of ourselves for having wronged him.
ADMIRATION, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.
BAPTISM, n. A sacred rite of such efficacy that he who finds himself in heaven without having undergone it will be unhappy forever. It is performed with water in two ways—by immersion, or plunging, and by aspersion, or sprinkling.
CALAMITY, n. A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
COENOBITE, n. A man who piously shuts himself up to meditate upon the sin of wickedness; and to keep it fresh in his mind joins a brotherhood of awful examples.
CONSOLATION, n. The knowledge that a better man is more unfortunate than yourself.
CRITIC, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.
DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters.
DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one’s life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.
EAVESDROP, v.i. Secretly to overhear a catalogue of the crimes and vices of another or yourself.
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
EMANCIPATION, n. A bondman’s change from the tyranny of another to the despotism of himself.
GRAMMAR, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.
IGNORAMUS, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.
INJUSTICE, n. A burden which of all those that we load upon others and carry ourselves is lightest in the hands and heaviest upon the back.
LOGOMACHY, n. A war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem—a kind of contest in which, the vanquished being unconscious of defeat, the victor is denied the reward of success.
MUGWUMP, n. In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to the vice of independence. A term of contempt.
NEIGHBOR, n. One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.
PHILANTHROPIST, n. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.
PITIFUL, adj. The state of an enemy or opponent after an imaginary encounter with oneself.
RAZOR, n. An instrument used by the Caucasian to enhance his beauty, by the Mongolian to make a guy of himself, and by the Afro-American to affirm his worth.
RESPLENDENT, adj. Like a simple American citizen beduking himself in his lodge, or affirming his consequence in the Scheme of Things as an elemental unit of a parade.
RIBALDRY, n. Censorious language by another concerning oneself.
SELF-ESTEEM, n. An erroneous appraisement.
SELF-EVIDENT, adj. Evident to one’s self and to nobody else.
VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
WASHINGTONIAN, n. A Potomac tribesman who exchanged the privilege of governing himself for the advantage of good government. In justice to him it should be said that he did not want to.
Whatever discoveries have been made in the region of self-love, there remain many unexplored territories there.
The passions possess a certain injustice and self interest which makes it dangerous to follow them, and in reality we should distrust them even when they appear most trustworthy.
Our self love endures more impatiently the condemnation of our tastes than of our opinions.
Pride has a larger part than goodness in our remonstrances with those who commit faults, and we reprove them not so much to correct as to persuade them that we ourselves are free from faults.
A man often believes himself leader when he is led; as his mind endeavours to reach one goal, his heart insensibly drags him towards another.
The attachment or indifference which philosophers have shown to life is only the style of their self love, about which we can no more dispute than of that of the palate or of the choice of colours.
Nothing should so much diminish the satisfaction which we feel with ourselves as seeing that we disapprove at one time of that which we approve of at another.
To establish ourselves in the world we do everything to appear as if we were established.
If there is a pure love, exempt from the mixture of our other passions, it is that which is concealed at the bottom of the heart and of which even ourselves are ignorant.
We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect.
What men term friendship is merely a partnership with a collection of reciprocal interests, and an exchange of favours—in fact it is but a trade in which self love always expects to gain something.
We often persuade ourselves to love people who are more powerful than we are, yet interest alone produces our friendship; we do not give our hearts away for the good we wish to do, but for that we expect to receive.
Self love increases or diminishes for us the good qualities of our friends, in proportion to the satisfaction we feel with them, and we judge of their merit by the manner in which they act towards us.
We are inconsolable at being deceived by our enemies and betrayed by our friends, yet still we are often content to be thus served by ourselves.
We become so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that at last we are disguised to ourselves.
The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.
If we never flattered ourselves the flattery of others would not hurt us.
What makes us like new studies is not so much the weariness we have of the old or the wish for change as the desire to be admired by those who know more than ourselves, and the hope of advantage over those who know less.
When our vices leave us we flatter ourselves with the idea we have left them.
He who thinks he has the power to content the world greatly deceives himself, but he who thinks that the world cannot be content with him deceives himself yet more.
It would seem that even self-love may be the dupe of goodness and forget itself when we work for others. And yet it is but taking the shortest way to arrive at its aim, taking usury under the pretext of giving, in fact winning everybody in a subtle and delicate manner.
The fidelity of most men is merely an invention of self-love to win confidence; a method to place us above others and to render us depositaries of the most important matters.
The usual education of young people is to inspire them with a second self-love.
There is no passion wherein self-love reigns so powerfully as in love, and one is always more ready to sacrifice the peace of the loved one than his own.
A quickness in believing evil without having sufficiently examined it, is the effect of pride and laziness. We wish to find the guilty, and we do not wish to trouble ourselves in examining the crime.
It is difficult to love those we do not esteem, but it is no less so to love those whom we esteem much more than ourselves.
Whatever good quality may be imputed to us, we ourselves find nothing new in it.
The extreme delight we take in talking of ourselves should warn us that it is not shared by those who listen.
What commonly hinders us from showing the recesses of our heart to our friends, is not the distrust we have of them, but that we have of ourselves.
We often comfort ourselves by the weakness of evils, for which reason has not the strength to console us.
Humility is the true proof of Christian virtues; without it we retain all our faults, and they are only covered by pride to hide them from others, and often from ourselves.
The evils we do to others give us less pain than those we do to ourselves.
The violences we put upon ourselves to escape love are often more cruel than the cruelty of those we love.
The desire of talking about ourselves, and of putting our faults in the light we wish them to be seen, forms a great part of our sincerity.
It may well be that those who have trapped us by their tricks do not seem to us so foolish as we seem to ourselves when trapped by the tricks of others.
We often credit ourselves with vices the reverse of what we have, thus when weak we boast of our obstinacy.
Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves.
The same pride which makes us blame faults from which we believe ourselves free causes us to despise the good qualities we have not.
Pride as the other passions has its follies. We are ashamed to own we are jealous, and yet we plume ourselves in having been and being able to be so.
Some people are so self-occupied that when in love they find a mode by which to be engrossed with the passion without being so with the person they love.
The tendency of a person to allow himself to be degraded, robbed, deceived, and exploited might be the diffidence of a God among men.
A thing that is explained ceases to concern us—What did the God mean who gave the advice, “Know thyself!” Did it perhaps imply “Cease to be concerned about thyself! become objective!”—And Socrates?—And the “scientific man”?
We all feign to ourselves that we are simpler than we are, we thus relax ourselves away from our fellows.
To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.
There is an innocence of admiration: it is possessed by him to whom it has not yet occurred that he himself may be admired some day.
In sight of every PARTY.—A shepherd has always need of a bell-wether—or he has himself to be a wether occasionally.
How can a man come to know himself? Never by thinking, but by doing. Try to do your duty, and you will know at once what you are worth.
The world of reason is to be regarded as a great and immortal being, who ceaselessly works out what is necessary, and so makes himself lord also over what is accidental.
Be genuine and strenuous; earn for yourself, and look for, grace from those in high places; from the powerful, favour; from the active and the good, advancement; from the many, affection; from the individual, love.
Every man must think after his own fashion; for on his own path he finds a truth, or a kind of truth, which helps him through life. But he must not give himself the rein; he must control himself; mere naked instinct does not become him.
It is a great error to take oneself for more than one is, or for less than one is worth.
But how is a young man to come of himself to see blame in things which every one is busy with, which every one approves and promotes? Why should he not follow his natural bent and go in the same direction as they?
Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.
To fulfil a duty is still always to feel it as a debt, for it is never quite satisfying to oneself.
If a man is to achieve all that is asked of him, he must take himself for more than he is, and as long as he does not carry it to an absurd length, we willingly put up with it.
It is much easier to put yourself in the position of a mind taken up with the most absolute error, than of one which mirrors to itself half-truths.
We should know one another better if one man were not so anxious to put himself on an equality with another.
Eminent men are therefore in a worse plight than others; for, as we cannot compare ourselves with them, we are on the watch for them.
It is said that vain self-praise stinks in the nostrils. That may be so; but for the kind of smell which comes from unjust blame by others the public has no nose at all.
If a man does think too much of himself, he is more than he believes himself to be.
Faith is private capital, kept in one’s own house. There are public savings-banks and loan-offices, which supply individuals in their day of need; but here the creditor quietly takes his interest for himself.
Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then criticism will gradually yield to him.
If a man has always let himself think the world as bad as the adversary represents it to be, he must have become a miserable person.
There is no virtue in subordinating oneself; but there is virtue in descending, and in recognising anything as above us, which is beneath us.
Truth is at variance with our natures, but not so error; and for a very simple reason. Truth requires us to recognise ourselves as limited, but error flatters us with the belief that in one way or another we are subject to no bounds at all.
If a man knows where to get good advice, it is as though he could supply it himself.
If a man cannot lift a stone himself, let him leave it, even though he has some one to help him.
Despotism promotes general self-government, because from top to bottom it makes the individual responsible, and so produces the highest degree of activity.
Every one suffers who does not work for himself. A man works for others to have them share in his joy.
It is no wonder that we all more or less delight in the mediocre, because it leaves us in peace: it gives us the comfortable feeling of intercourse with what is like ourselves.
We cannot escape a contradiction in ourselves; we must try to resolve it. If the contradiction comes from others, it does not affect us: it is their affair.
In the world people take a man at his own estimate; but he must estimate himself at something. Disagreeableness is more easily tolerated than insignificance.
A man has only to declare himself free to feel at the same moment that he is limited. Should he venture to declare himself limited, he feels himself free.
To communicate oneself is Nature; to receive a communication as it is given is Culture.
The sensual man often laughs when there is nothing to laugh at. Whatever it is that moves him, he shows that he is pleased with himself.
It is said of a man that he will soon die, when he acts in any way unlike himself.
What kind of faults in ourselves should we retain, nay, even cultivate? Those which rather flatter other people than offend them.
From a strict point of view we must have a reformation of ourselves every day, and protest against others, even though it be in no religious sense.
The German runs no greater danger than to advance with and by the example of his neighbours. There is perhaps no nation that is fitter for the process of self-development; so that it has proved of the greatest advantage to Germany to have obtained the notice of the world so late.
From this time forward, if a man does not apply himself to some art or handiwork, he will be in a bad way. In the rapid changes of the world, knowledge is no longer a furtherance; by the time a man has taken note of everything, he has lost himself.
Besides, in these days the world forces universal culture upon us, and so we need not trouble ourselves further about it; we must appropriate some particular culture.
To be and remain true to oneself and others, is to possess the noblest attribute of the greatest talents.
Credo Deum! That is a fine, a worthy thing to say; but to recognise God where and as he reveals himself, is the only true bliss on earth.
A burnt child dreads the fire; an old man who has often been singed is afraid of warming himself.
Let every man ask himself with which of his faculties he can and will somehow influence his age.
Character in matters great and small consists in a man steadily pursuing the things of which he feels himself capable.
With those who are really of like disposition with himself a man cannot long be at variance; he will always come to an agreement again. With those who are really of adverse disposition, he may in vain try to preserve harmony; he will always come to a separation again.
For the strenuous man the difficulty is to recognise the merits of elder contemporaries and not let himself be hindered by their defects.
If a man would enter upon some course of knowledge, he must either be deceived or deceive himself, unless external necessity irresistibly determines him. Who would become a physician if, at one and the same time, he saw before him all the horrible sights that await him?
An author can show no greater respect for his public than by never bringing it what it expects, but what he himself thinks right and proper in that stage of his own and others’ culture in which for the time he finds himself.
If a man sets out to reproach an author with obscurity, he should first of all examine his own mind, to see if he is himself all clearness within. Twilight makes even plain writing illegible.
So long as our scholastic education takes us back to antiquity and furthers the study of the Greek and Latin languages, we may congratulate ourselves that these studies, so necessary for the higher culture, will never disappear.
If we set our gaze on antiquity and earnestly study it, in the desire to form ourselves thereon, we get the feeling as if it were only then that we really became men.
The pedagogue, in trying to write and speak Latin, has a higher and grander idea of himself than would be permissible in ordinary life.
It is seldom that any one of great age becomes historical to himself, and finds his contemporaries become historical to him, so that he neither cares nor is able to argue with any one.
Ovid remained classical even in exile: it is not in himself that he sees misfortune, but in his banishment from the metropolis of the world.
The peculiar value of so-called popular ballads is that their motives are drawn direct from nature. This, however, is an advantage of which the poet of culture could also avail himself, if he knew how to do it.
If you would be a favorite of your king, address yourself to his weaknesses. An application to his reason will seldom prove very successful.