Quotes to inspire and reflect

Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.

Self-knowledge is a dangerous thing, tending to make man shallow or insane.

Go to your bosom; / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

A man may call to mind the face of his friend, but not his own. Here, then, is an initial difficulty in the way of applying the maxim, Know Thyself.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

Who’s not sat tense before his own heart’s curtain?

If men knew themselves, God would heal and pardon them.

We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?

Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord.

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too..

Let a man once see himself as others see him, and all enthusiasm vanishes from his heart.

It is doubtless a vice to turn one’s eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.

There is no purifier like knowledge in this world: / time makes man find himself in his heart.

It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.

i have noticed / that when / chickens quit / quarreling over their / food they often / find that there is / enough for all of them / i wonder if / it might not / be the same way / with the / human race.

Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.

It astounds us to come upon other egoists, as though we alone had the right to be selfish, and be filled with eagerness to live.

The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way.

Glory consists of two parts: the one in setting too great a value upon ourselves, and the other in setting too little a value upon others.

A sick man that gets talking about himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop.

What, will the world be quite overturned when you die?

We all wish to be of importance in one way or another. The child coughs with might and main, since it has no other claim on the company.

Man errs not that he deems / His welfare his true aim, / He errs because he dreams / The world does but exist that welfare to bestow.

Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven’t even got a self to express.

A man must first despise himself, and then others will despise him.

The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

I’m still the same person who grew up mostly in a Midwestern, factory-working neighborhood where talk about “self-esteem” would have seemed like a luxury.

1 began to understand that self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.

Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.

Let a man’s talents or virtues be what thej' may, we only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.

All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude—and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.

It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

So there was not an “I” anymore—not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect—save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.

He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.

It is easy—terribly easy—to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.

He that listens after what people say of him shall never have peace.

Any work looks wonderful to me except the one which I can do.

You must not on any account give me credit for being penetrating. I have impressed people that way before, and the result is always disaster.

The fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

Life is what our character makes it. We fashion it, as a snail does its shell. A man can say: “I never made a fortune because it is not in my character to be rich."

We can’t reach old age by another man’s road.

You will fetter my leg, but not Zeus himself can get the better of my free will.

In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.

If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.