The greater a child’s terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.

You have to learn to recognize your own depths.

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

Self-improvement without self-love is like building a house upon sand. You can build and build, but it will always sink.

I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that...

There’s such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I’m such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable,...

Wisest is she who knows she does not know.

There’s nothing lonelier than empty relationships. At least when you’re alone you can be yourself, but when you’re in empty relationships you can’t even be yourself.You can be real alone, or you can be a...

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the...

It is not until you learn to look at yourself, through the truth of who you are, that you can look at someone else.

I think it’s good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone.

At thirty a man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan; At fifty chides his infamous delay, Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve; In all the magnanimity of thought Resolves;...

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When...

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the...

SCREW CHILDREN! That’s the mantra of the world. Instead of burying them with a national debt, shoving them in shitty schools, drugging them if they don’t comply, hitting them, yelling at them, indoctrinating them with...

In wishing to know ourselves fully, we must forget our quest for gain and seek only completion. At a certain point in our development, we no longer even seek to become Mystic, Magister, Sorcerer, or...

The most adventurous journey to embark on; is the journey to yourself, the most exciting thing to discover; is who you really are, the most treasured pieces that you can find; are all the pieces...

It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.

I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.

To stand by yourself — that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation...

One of the best ways of repressing emotions is artificial certainty.

If you ate nails, your stomach would hurt, and it’s a good thing that it would. Eating nails is deadly, thus the pain is helpful. Like this, sadness, anger, and anxiety are not to be...

Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself–he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the...

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid’s movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the...

The only relationships that exist are based on truth. Everything else is just a mutual and isolating delusion.

Throughout human history beauty has been seen as a gift from God, but Mom had another notion; she thought that beauty could be earned through self-knowledge. It may be a revolutionary idea, but it has...

If you do not respect your own wishes, no one else will. You will simply attract people who disrespect you as much as you do.

I don’t dwell on the fact that I may have ridden on planes. That which I can’t remember having needed, I simply accept. It is the most preferable kind of self-insight: one that does not...

One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance ‘do the right...

Intuition: the feeling you know something when you know nothing.

I saw myself…. In the time I watched, I saw strength—and frailty. Pride and vanity, courage and fear. Of wisdom, a little. Of folly, much. Of intentions, many good ones; but many more left undone....

The only part of you that hurts when you’re given the truth is the part that lives on lies.

If you’re not comfortable enough with yourself or with your own truth when entering a relationship, then you’re not ready for that relationship.

We must not be defined by what we do, but we must be what and who we are, then only happen to do what we do!

No matter how strange things get, know that with every breath, you are becoming that which you have always been.

If I follow a particular method of knowing myself, then I shall have the result which that system necessitates; but the result will obviously not be the understanding of myself.

Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.

To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?

There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.

When you discover your own self, you will see that same infinite potential in your lover’s eyes.

Low states are a like a poison to the psyche. Millions of people throughout the world take tranquillizers each day to combat depression, but this does not tackle its root cause, which is found in...

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.

…[T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics. … Unless this job...

To know oneself and one’s end or goal in life is true wisdom—knowledge of the heart more than the head.