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.

Know one, know all.

The three most important words in a relationship are not, ‘I love you,’ but, ‘Tell me more.

Whoever wants the “I” to yield up its mysterious and tremendous secret must stop it from looking perpetually in the mirror, must stop the little ego’s fascination with its own image.

You only grow when you are alone.

If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less...

Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.

To know oneself means above all to know what one likes

Recognizing who you are is not the subtext of a life. It’s the main point.

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...

I had the right to remain silent… but I didn’t have the ability.

Let us each take up our flaming torches and mount as the blazing fireballs of light that we are and let’s burn the skies and leave it with deep scars and let them be our...

LearningTo believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.

In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic...

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new...

I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.

As I think of myself, so I shall be.

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.

Thinking, he walked ever more slowly and asked himself, What is it now that you were hoping to learn from doctrines and teachers, and what is it that they—who taught you so much—were unable to...

Would he ever come back? He wondered. The water filled his ears with its own rush, and he was comforted by the realization that, in fact, he never left.

I don’t want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.