"Self-knowledge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well to know what subjects are within the limits of your pencil; many have failed of success from the want of this self-knowledge. But pray tell me, what is the essential difference between Poetry and Prose? is it solely the melody or measure ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... of that which has no attribute: I say, then, these powers and relations of the mind, which one finds everywhere treated of in Theosophical literature, are the determining factors in the formation of our Ethics. And since, from Socrates down, we are taught that self-knowledge is necessary for guidance of one's conduct, the knowledge of the mind and its capacities is at once shadowed forth as of immense value. It has at least three elementary powers—viz., the power of knowing, the power of feeling, and the power of acting. These powers, though ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... philosophy poses as a Cato Major for the edification of the semi-scientific millions of young persons to whom he addresses his volumes. We have a whole chapter on Practical Life, [24] on self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, full of portentous platitudes and ancient saws; St. Paul's doctrine of charity, and all that is best in the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, is liberated from its degrading association with the belief in a God who rewards ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... which doth so easily beset him, whatever it may be. Whatever anguish of mind it may cost him, it is a light price to pay for the inestimable treasure which true repentance and amendment brings; the fine gold of solid self-knowledge, tried in the fire of bitter experience; the white raiment of a pure and simple heart; the eye- salve of honest self-condemnation and noble shame. If he have but these—and these God will give him, in ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the processes of spiritual growth, there is ample scope for that training in self-knowledge and self-control which is commonly understood by the word "submission." But the character of the act is materially altered. It is no longer a half-despairing resignation to a superior force external to ourselves, which we can ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... she felt the unbecomingness of saying anything that might convey a notion of it to others. Mr. Casaubon, indeed, had not thoroughly represented those mixed reasons to himself; irritated feeling with him, as with all of us, seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge. But he wished to repress outward signs, and only Dorothea could discern the changes in her husband's face before he observed with more of dignified bending and ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... deepens the religious life as true repentance, nor is there anything so fatal to true religion as self-righteousness. "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." "To whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little." But the first prerequisite of repentance is self-knowledge—a difficult matter. Gross carnal offences, strong and flagrant sins, if such there be, are obvious and upon the surface. The subtler sins of the spirit— thoughtlessness, for example, or snobbishness or priggishness and pride—though we are quick to remark upon them in others, ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... shyness or precaution or artifice, a woman never speaks out her whole thought, and moreover what she herself knows of it is but a part of what it really is. Complete frankness seems to be impossible to her, and complete self-knowledge seems to be forbidden her. If she is a sphinx to us, it is because she is a riddle of doubtful meaning even to herself. She has no need of perfidy, for she is mystery itself. A woman is something fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... able to discover under any ordinary conditions of self-knowledge, how intimately that spiritual part of us, which is undying, can attach to itself and its operations the poorest objects of that external world around us, which is perishable. In the ravelled skein, the slightest threads are the hardest to follow. In analysing the associations and sympathies ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... sufferest, then, from this or anything else except wrong against God, it is a clear sign to thee that this love is still imperfect, and drawn far from the Source. What way is there, then, to make the imperfect perfect? This way: to correct and chastise the movements of thy heart with true self-knowledge, and with hatred and distaste for thy imperfection, that thou art such a peasant as to give to the creature that love which ought to be given wholly to God, loving the creature without moderation, and God moderately. For love toward God should be without measure, and that for ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... become disgusted with myself. Not very often, it is true, for I don't understand the self-abhorrence that I occasionally see long drawn out in the strictly private printed diaries of good dead people. A man's self-knowledge, as regards his Maker, is a matter that lies only between his Maker and himself, of which no printed or written (scarcely even spoken) words can give, or ought to give, a true transcript; but in respect of our relations to other people I suppose we may ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... whom he came into contact, that their philosophy was something foreign to them and outside of their own lives. They studied human nature for the sake of talking learnedly about it, not for the sake of self-knowledge; they laboured to instruct others, not to enlighten themselves within. When they published a book, its contents only interested them to the extent of making the world accept it, without seriously troubling themselves whether it were true or false, provided ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the fine flower of his manhood royally and very sweetly disclosed. Her whole being yearned towards him; but humbly, a note of lowliness in her appreciation, as towards something exalted, far above her in experience, in self-knowledge and self-discipline. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... endowed with intellect and will and freedom, God is a PERSON; and a LIVING person also, for He is both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this distinguishes the living from the lifeless. He is thus absolutely SELF-SUFFICIENT: his SELF-KNOWLEDGE and SELF-LOVE are both of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... he? I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common. Bless you, my dear, a man no more sees himself, as others see him, in a moral looking-glass, than he does in a mirror out of his dressing-box. I know a man who has forged bills, run off with his neighbour's wife, and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... is self-knowledge, modesty, or disinclination, I leave the reader to decide, who, no doubt, will smile at the young man's innocence in imagining that Parisian, or, indeed, any journals distinguish themselves generally by maturity and competence ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... in the ornaments of the room. She had always combined a love of serious and poetical reading with her skill in fancy-work, and the neatly-bound copies of Dryden's 'Virgil,' Hannah More's 'Sacred Dramas,' Falconer's 'Shipwreck,' Mason 'On Self-Knowledge,' 'Rasselas,' and Burke 'On the Sublime and Beautiful,' which were the chief ornaments of the bookcase, were all inscribed with her name, and had been bought with her pocket-money when she was in her teens. It must have been at least fifteen years since the latest ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... of self-knowledge in Ruth, which she delivered with a gleam of some secret pleasantry, made me stop and look closely at her: but she pretended not to know it. "There is something in this child," I thought, "very different from other girls. What ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... devoted himself exclusively to another. It does not require that a woman should be in love to be irritated at this; it does not require that she should even acknowledge to herself that it was unpleasant to her. Eleanor had no such self-knowledge. She thought in her own heart it was only on Mr Arabin's account that she regretted that he could condescend to be amused by the signora. 'I thought he had more mind,' she said to herself, as she sat watching her ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Christ, Truth, saith unto you, "Be not afraid!"—fear not sin, lest thereby it master you; but only fear to sin. Watch and pray for self-knowledge; [30] since then, and thus, cometh repentance,—and your superiority ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... Milton are often miserable, and, where he is right, it seems to be by a sort of accident. He constantly appeals to the French critics as authorities. Another advantage will result from establishing principles of judging—we shall acquire self-knowledge. We can not ask ourselves, Is this true? does it accord with my own consciousness? etc., without gaining an acquaintance with ourselves. And then, in general, the more the taste is cultivated and refined, the more we shall find to like. Critics by rule, who have one narrow standard ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... truancies in France or Belgium before he began to earn a livelihood. Two deaths, a year's interval between them, released him from his office. Upon these events and their issue he had not counted; independence came to him as a great surprise, and on the path of self-knowledge he had far to travel before the significance of that and many another turning-point grew clear to ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... dainty, flowered ironwork for instance, the overflow of Italian genius was traceable. These things [147] presented themselves at last only to remind him that, in a new intellectual hope, he was already on his way home. Straight through life, straight through nature and man, with one's own self-knowledge as a light thereon, not by way of the geographical Italy or Greece, lay the road to the new Hellas, to be realised now as the outcome of home-born German genius. At times, in that early fine weather, looking now not southwards, but towards Germany, he seemed to trace the outspread ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... 'Saying this, the weeping king sat himself down upon the ground. Then a learned Brahmana, Saunaka by name versed in self-knowledge and skilled in the Sankhya system of yoga, addressed the king, saying, 'Causes of grief by thousands, and causes of fear by hundreds, day after day, overwhelm the ignorant but not the wise. Surely, sensible men ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... vain," said he, with that self-knowledge which is so general an attribute of human beings; "no man less so, nor am I jealous; but I respect myself, and I could never be content to share your time and your regard with Colonel Dujardin, nor with a ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... decision of 1854 by the assumption of a miraculous interposition of divine favor, and the reflex influence of the merits of her Son. There is not a single mortal who must not charge himself with some defect or folly, and man's consciousness of sin and unworthiness deepens just in proportion to his self-knowledge and progress in virtue and goodness. There is not a single saint who has not experienced a new birth from above, and an actual conversion from sin to holiness, and who does not feel daily the need of repentance ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... stepping aside at stated times for a few years till it is well established and normal. To higher beings that looked down upon human life as we do upon flowers, these would be the most interesting and beautiful hours of blossoming. With more self-knowledge women will have more self-respect at this time. Savagery reveres this state and it gives to women a mystic awe. The time may come when we must even change the divisions of the year for women, leaving to man his week and giving to her ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... self-knowledge and self-control to keep pace with the rapid changes of bodily structure, sense-impressions, and mental organization is nowhere more marked and significant than in sex development; and the common experience of adolescent boys is to the effect that no other ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... mountain of self-knowledge, said the Victorine mystics, is the necessary prelude to all illumination. Only at its summit do we discover, as Dante did, the beginning of the pathway to Reality. It is a lonely and an arduous excursion, a sufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer to dwell in ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... every one needs love first—that all the other human needs come after that great necessity. He had thought himself a man full of self-knowledge, full of knowledge of others. But he had not known himself. Perhaps even now the real man was hiding somewhere, far down, shrinking away for fear of being known, for fear of being ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... might spoil sport; the other gets an innumerable quantity of facts together, and lets them tell their story as they may. The facts are stubborn in the last instance as the men are in the first, and in neither case is the broth spoiled by the cook.' Both heroes show modesty and self-knowledge, but 'little boldness or inventiveness of genius.' On the strength of this doctrine he even compares Scott disadvantageously with Godwin and Mrs. Inchbald, who had, it seems, more invention though fewer facts. Hazlitt was not ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... can not, with loyalty to my inner conscience, hold to those vows?" exclaimed David, with more warmth. "I have long felt that I was not fitted for this sacred calling. Before the secret tribunal of my self-knowledge, I have stood charged with the sin of hypocrisy. It has been God's will that I be delivered from ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... Again, the more things the mind knows, the better does it understand its own strength and the order of nature; by increased self-knowledge, it can direct itself more easily, and lay down rules for its own guidance; and, by increased knowledge of nature, it can more easily avoid what is useless. (2) And this is the sum total of method, as we have ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... Defeat, my Defeat, my self-knowledge and my defiance, Through you I know that I am yet young and swift of foot And not to be trapped by withering laurels. And in you I have found aloneness And the joy ...
— The Madman • Kahlil Gibran
... addressing Mrs. Scott familiarly as "Charlotte."[23] Hogg wrote certain short poems, the beauty of which in their kind Sir Walter himself never approached; but he was a man almost without self-restraint or self-knowledge, though he had a great deal of self-importance, and hardly knew how much he owed to Scott's magnanimous and ever-forbearing kindness, or if he did, felt the weight of gratitude a burden on his heart. Very different was William Laidlaw, a farmer on the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... bad influence, and their good receives: By objects, which might force the soul to abate Her feeling, rendered more compassionate; Is placable—because occasions rise So often that demand such sacrifice; More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure, As tempted more; more able to endure, As more ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... this struggle dawned self-knowledge, and the strength which is born of it. When she returned to the house, she was pale and weary, but capable of responding to Betty Rambo's constant cheerfulness. The next day she left for the city, without having seen ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... counsels by which Mrs. Norris assisted to form her nieces' minds; and it is not very wonderful that, with all their promising talents and early information, they should be entirely deficient in the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity and humility. In everything but disposition they were admirably taught. Sir Thomas did not know what was wanting, because, though a truly anxious father, he was not outwardly affectionate, and ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... exasperating to be placidly assured by our British critics that America is sublimely unconscious that her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour because she is lacking in self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, which they would have us believe is a sort of premature senescence and decay. The New World is pitied for her failure to know without ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... except as they might contribute to the advancement of his power. Power!—that was his ambition now. First he had wished to have an independent income in order to be free. When he had achieved that, it was at the sacrifice of his mental freedom. And now, with the clearness of self-knowledge which only men of great ability have, he knew that the one cause for which ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... purest, bravest, and most spiritual being they had ever met. The same conviction is forced upon his biographer. During his four last years this most loveable of men was becoming gradually riper, wiser, truer to his highest instincts. The imperfections of his youth were being rapidly absorbed. His self-knowledge was expanding, his character mellowing, and his genius growing daily stronger. Without losing the fire that burned in him, he had been lessoned by experience into tempering its fervour; and when he reached the age ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... either the moral law is degraded from its holiness, being represented as indulging our convenience, or else men strain after an unattainable aim, hoping to gain absolute holiness of will, thus losing themselves in fanatical theosophic dreams utterly contradicting self-knowledge. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... desiring to empty himself of all extraneous elements, all conventional traditions, all adopted ideas; his idea of life indeed was that it was an educative process, and that the further that the soul could advance upon the path of self-knowledge and sincerity, the more that it could cast away all the things that were not of its essence, the better prepared one was to be filled with the divine wisdom. The deeper that he plunged into the consideration ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... likes being quite alone before he takes the Sacrament; we played part of Mozart's Requiem, and then he read to me out of Stunden den Andacht (Hours of Devotion) the article on Selbster Kentniss (Self-knowledge.)" The whole sounds like a sweet, solemn, blessed pause in the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... self-knowledge is, therefore, necessary for those who would be anything or do anything in the world. It is also one of the first essentials to the formation of distinct personal convictions. Frederick Perthes once said to a young friend, "You know only too well what you can ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... the ceiling. It was all very well, but ten years had made a difference—a mighty difference; a difference which beat all his calculations. It was a double difference, too; for all the while that he had been shrinking in self-knowledge, his reputation at home had been expanding like ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... scientist on a scientific subject to which he had given no systematic study would be laughed at by his professional brethren, and would suffer from it even in his professional reputation, as it would be taken to indicate a dangerous want of self-knowledge. Perhaps, then, the training given in the divinity schools, though it does not touch special fields of science, is such as to prepare the mind for the work of induction by some course of intellectual gymnastics. Perhaps, though it does not ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... the functions of [85] government. But this comes from the working-class being, as I have often said, still an embryo, of which no one can yet quite foresee the final development; and from its not having the same experience and self-knowledge as the aristocratic and middle classes. Honesty it no doubt has, just like the other classes of Englishmen, but honesty in an inchoate and untrained state; and meanwhile its powers of action, which are, as Mr. Frederic ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... some of the sensations experienced and have their specific meanings, which must be grouped, counter-effects considered, and conclusions drawn from this to make the forecast or outline of the subject's future. To avert mistakes, however, the reader of destinies must have sufficient self-knowledge to distinguish his own influences or vibrations from those sensed in others and not combine them as coming from one source. Every individual is governed by this 'cause upon him,' and if he studies himself he ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... flying back to his loved resorts. Apart from its poetic value, the book is a graphical and interesting portraiture of the struggles of an ingenuous and impetuous mind to arrive at a clear insight into its own interior constitution and external relations, and to secure the composure of self-knowledge and of equally adjusted aspirations. As a poem it is likely to lay fast and enduring hold on pure and aspiring intellects, and to strengthen the claim of Wordsworth to endure ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... disciple was confronted in due time with a document that would not yield its secrets to dialectic, a kind of ritual in words that initiated his intuition into self-knowledge. Intense devotion was needed, imagination, and will-power. The Gnosis came gradually, perhaps after the manuscript had been laid aside; it was the effort towards a sympathetic understanding that mattered, ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... heaven for himself; to make him feel himself guilty before God; and to feel, moreover, that even were he admitted into the Divine presence, yet, till his heart be (so to say) made over again, he cannot perfectly enjoy God. This, surely, is the state of self-knowledge; these are the convictions to which every one is brought on, who attempts honestly to obey the precepts of God. I do not mean that all that I have been saying will necessarily pass through his mind, and in the same order, or that he will be conscious of it, or ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... and consistent in the all-pervading principle by which he insisted upon the common source of power in government,—of the State, of the family, and of one's self. Self-knowledge and self-control he maintained to be the fountain of all personal virtue and attainment in performance of the moral duties owed to others, whether above or below in social standing. He supposed that ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... passion which I sometimes depict. They say that the personal and convincing element is totally absent because I have not lived"—he laughed—"and loved; that my work lacks the one thing which only the self-knowledge of great happiness and great pain can lend to it.... And—I think they are right, Valerie. What ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... animal!" cries Richard in scorn, and for weeks he was as troubled by this rudiment of self-knowledge as Tom by his letters. Sir Austin had him instructed in the wonders of anatomy, to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... understand! Fool that I am who enlightened you. But yours was the injury of bruised faith—the suffering caused by outrage. No hell of self-contempt set you crawling about the world in agony; no despicable self-knowledge drove you out into the waste places. Yours was the sorrow of a self-respecting victim; mine the grief of the damned fool who has done to death all that he ever loved for the love of expediency and ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... the dominion of the physical body and its surroundings, which must become his servants. Hence the first and chief necessity of Chelaship is a spirit of absolute unselfishness and devotion to Truth; then follow self-knowledge and self-mastery. These are all-important; while outward observance of fixed rules of life is a matter of ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... motionless palms, and the faint plashing of the hidden fountain was like an exquisite melody in his ears. It was good to be in such a place, to look on such a woman, to breathe such odours, and to hear such tuneful music. A dreamlike, half-mysterious satisfaction of the senses dulled the keen self-knowledge of body and soul for one short moment. In the stormy play of his troubled life there was a brief interlude of peace. He tasted the fruit of the lotus, his lips were moistened in the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... selfishness; it is the very reverse. Self-reverence is the antipode of self-conceit, of selfishness. If you honour yourself, you will be careful that nothing dishonourable shall come from you. 'Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control;' we, too, have had a ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... self-knowledge very much. I do not believe, in the first place, that you are aware how wonderfully you are improved. You do not look the same girl you did a year ago. You have grown taller, fairer, brighter, Gabriella. I did not expect to see this, when I heard you had shut yourself up in the academy again, under ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... to self-development. Through an understanding of his own aptitudes and talents one may find fullest expression for the highest possibilities of his intellect and spirit. A man who thus knows himself needs no other discoverer. The key to self-knowledge is intelligent, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... profundity of her words. At last he believed that through her he understood himself. It wasn't youth that he or anybody coveted; it was the more supreme boon of not growing old. He had just arrived at this new self-knowledge when ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... forces are creeping into every weak place, and the men of our time may see strange things. Gradually a certain resolute body of men are teaching weaker people that even self-discipline is unnecessary, and that self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control are only phrases used by interested people who want to hold others in slavery. In our England it is plainer every day that the character of the people is changing. Individual men are obedient, brave to the death, self-sacrificing, just ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... think that by removing all the difficulties of our life we shall more quickly reach our aim, but on the contrary, my dear sir, it is only in the midst of worldly cares that we can attain our three chief aims: (1) Self-knowledge—for man can only know himself by comparison, (2) Self-perfecting, which can only be attained by conflict, and (3) The attainment of the chief virtue—love of death. Only the vicissitudes of life can show us its vanity and develop our innate love of death or of rebirth to a new life." These words ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... disciples, as a foundation precept, this apparently simple maxim, "Know thyself." He meant this, it is true, in a much higher sense than we are aiming at in these conversations of ours, but his rule is so practical, that although you have only as yet taken a mere peep into one small corner of self-knowledge, you find, if I am not much mistaken, that your heart has beaten once or twice rather faster than it did before. Was I wrong, in saying from the beginning, that we become better as we grow in knowledge? ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... of the Anti-Semites: "We depend for sustenance on the nations who are our hosts, and if we had no hosts to support us we should die of starvation." This is a point that shows how unjust accusations may weaken our self-knowledge. But what are the true grounds for this statement concerning the nations that act as "hosts"? Where it is not based on limited physiocratic views it is founded on the childish error that commodities pass from hand to hand in continuous rotation. We need not wake from long slumber, like Rip van ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... destructive the royal prerogative is and must be to the king as an individual; how the artificial regard which hedges him in, interposing countless barriers between the truth and him, makes his relations to his surroundings false and deprives him of the opportunity for self-knowledge which normal relations supply. Royalty is therefore a curse, because it robs its possessor of the wholesome discipline of life which is the right of every man that is born into ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the minister is seen suffering—not for the original sin, for that is overlaid, whelmed, forgotten, by the second and heavier transgression of hypocrisy, cowardice, desertion,—but merely from self-knowledge, the knowledge that he is a living lie. The characters, so treated, become hardly more than types, humanly outlined in figure, costume, and event, symbolic pictures of states of the soul, so simplified, so intense, so elementary as to belong to a phantasmagoric ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... life. Take it once and for all for granted that no human creature attains fruitful culture unless he learns his own powers and then resolves to apply them only in the directions where they tell best; without so much of self-knowledge he is no more a complete man than he would be were he deficient in self-reverence and self-control. He must dare to think for himself, or he will assuredly become a mediocrity, and probably more or less offensive. All his possible influence on his fellow-creatures must depart unless he thinks for ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... booty of other men's wits, are not excepted from the general condemnation of wrong-doers. Some day, perhaps, they will consent to profit by what they prig, and thus, like the fat knight, turn their diseases to commodity—the national disease of appropriation to the commodity of self-knowledge and self-rebuke. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... went on, 'it is you I love; my sentiment towards your sister is one of affection too, but protective, tutelary affection—no more. Say what you will I cannot help it. I mistook my feeling for her, and I know how much I am to blame for my want of self-knowledge. I have fought against this discovery night and day; but it cannot be concealed. Why did I ever see you, since I could not see you till I had committed myself? At the moment my eyes beheld you on that day of my arrival, I said, "This is the woman for whom my manhood ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... always do harm. Unselfish yielding, on the other hand, strengthens the will and increases strength of purpose as the petty obstacles of mere self-love are removed. Concentration alone cannot long remain wholesome, for it needs the light of growing self-knowledge to prevent its becoming self-centred. Yielding alone is of no avail, for in itself it has no constructive power. But if we try to look at ourselves as we really are, we shall find great strength in yielding where only our small and private interests are concerned, and concentrating ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... Joanna was in a strange fret—dreams seemed to hang over life like mist, there was sorrow in all she did, and yet a queer, suffocating joy. She told herself that she was upset by Martha's revelation, but at the same time she knew it had upset her not so much in itself as in the disturbing new self-knowledge it had brought. She could not hide from herself that she was delighted, overjoyed to find that her shepherd did not love her chicken-girl, that the thoughts she had thought about them for nine ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... work, rakes a confession of their faith in the virtue of the sex—all, the last drivellings of their egotism and impertinence. One might suppose that if anything could, the approach and contemplation of death might bring men to a sense of reason and self-knowledge. On the contrary, it seems only to deprive them of the little wit they had, and to make them even more the sport of their wilfulness and shortsightedness. Some men think that because they are going to be hanged, they are fully authorised ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... well-trained nation is forbidden to profit by the exercise of its peculiar art-skill; but because that peculiar art-skill can never be developed with a view to profit. The right fulfilment of national power in art depends always on THE DIRECTION OF ITS AIM BY THE EXPERIENCE OF AGES. Self-knowledge is not less difficult, nor less necessary for the direction of its genius, to a people than to an individual; and it is neither to be acquired by the eagerness of unpractised pride, nor during the anxieties of improvident distress. No nation ever ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... The memory has but a feeble recollection of what we were saying or doing a few weeks or a few months ago, and still less of what we were thinking or feeling. This is one among many reasons why there is so little self-knowledge among mankind; they do not carry with them the thought of what they are or have been. The so-called 'facts of consciousness' are equally evanescent; they are facts which nobody ever saw, and which can neither ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... by which Mrs. Norris assisted to form her nieces' minds; and it is not very wonderful that, with all their promising talents and early information, they should be entirely deficient in the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility. In everything but disposition, they were admirably taught. Sir Thomas did not know what was wanting, because, though a truly anxious father, he was not outwardly affectionate, and the reserve ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... his highest gains is the liberation of his inward power and the attainment of self-knowledge and self-mastery. No man is free until he knows himself, and whatever helps a man to come to clear understanding of himself helps him to attain freedom. A man does not command his resources of physical strength until he has so trained and developed his body that each part supplements ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... a falsehood? Falsehoods lurk in adjectives as well as substantives. Misapplied terms are strongholds of self-deception. Nobody says, 'I am unfortunate, therefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.' Such words are fortifications to keep self-knowledge and its brother repentance ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... have loved him, but when he sought me and asked me,— When to the men that offered their lives, the love of a woman Seemed so little to give!—I promised the love that he asked me, Sent him to war with my kiss on his lips, and thought him my hero. Afterward came the doubt, and out of long question, self-knowledge,— Came that great defeat, and the heart of the nation was withered; Mine leaped high with the awful relief won of death. But the horror, Then, of the crime that was wrought in that guilty moment of rapture,— Guilty as if my will had winged the bullet that struck him,— Clung to me ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... that distinction involves and carries its own identity; and that ultimate distinction—distinction in the last analysis—is self-distinction, 'self-knowledge,' as we realize it consciously every day. Knowledge is self-referred: to know is to know that you know, and ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... with his cynic's eye for self-scorn and self-depreciation, only an added excuse and more subtle temptation for the saving of himself. "No, I cannot do it," he said. And yet, somewhere at the back of his brain, the monotonous and oracular voice of a wise self-knowledge kept answering, "But you will do it, when you have had leisure to be lonely, and have tortured ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... evidence of the poet's direct knowledge of men? Of knowledge of man gained through acquaintance with Biblical, classical, foreign or English literature? Self-knowledge? ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... destructive criticism that, unlike charity, it generally begins and ends abroad; and those who cultivate the gentle art are seldom given to morbid introspection. Our prodigious ignorance about ourselves has not been blissful. Mistaking self-assertion for self-knowledge, we have presented the pathetic spectacle of a people casting the blame for their shortcomings on another people, yet bearing the consequences themselves. The national habit of living in the past seems to give us a present without achievement, a future without ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... not without a struggle that the Mayor had yielded himself to this true self-knowledge. But in vain he argued that he had not anticipated this fearful result, from proceedings that after all were only intended as the means of removing an obnoxious person from his path. In vain he reasoned with himself, "I did not wish the man's ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... Nature and Art, within our daily reach, inexhaustible sources of inquiry and contemplation. We are on every side surrounded by interesting objects; but, in nature, as in morals, we are apt to contemn self-knowledge, to look abroad rather than at home, and to study others instead of ourselves. Like the French Encyclopaedists, we forget our own Paris; or, like editors of newspapers, we seek for novelties in every quarter of the world, losing sight ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... moon upon the surface of the waters. The phenomenal world, as well as the subjectivity of our conception concerning our Egos, are nothing but, as it were, a mirage. The true sage will never submit to the temptations of illusion. He is well aware that man will attain to self-knowledge, and become a real Ego, only after the entire union of the personal fragment with the All, thus becoming an immutable, infinite, universal Brahma. Accordingly, he considers the whole cycle of birth, life, old age, and death as the sole product ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... thought a transition from motion to rest. Few are the delights of this world for him who, like me, has learned to know it. Murmur not, despair not of Providence. Me, through storms, it has brought to haven; through many griefs to self-knowledge; and through prisons to philosophy. He only can tranquilly descend to annihilation who finds reason not to repent he has once existed. My rudder broke not amid the rocks and quicksands, but my bark was cast upon the strand of knowledge. Yet, even on these clear shores are impenetrable clouds. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... of that deeply interesting dialogue illustrates the difficulty of self-knowledge, which can only be acquired by the teaching ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... weight with people, as their own experience might tell them that its acceptance is an entirely thoughtless and merely imitative process. But it tells them nothing of the kind, because they possess no self-knowledge whatever. It is only the elect Who Say with Plato: [Greek: tois pollois polla dokei] which means that the public has a good many bees in its bonnet, and that it would be a long business ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... nakedness into oneness with the Absolute, and thus loses all the faculties which, so far as we know, constitute its greatness, power, and glory. In this condition of absorption the human soul is not only deprived of its separate existence, but also of all self-knowledge, which is ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... perfectly placid and clear, reflects the very image of the Deity. When you stand, therefore, in front of the shrine to worship, you see your own image reflected on its shining surface, and the act of worship is tantamount to the old Delphic injunction, "Know Thyself." But self-knowledge does not imply, either in the Greek or Japanese teaching, knowledge of the physical part of man, not his anatomy or his psycho-physics; knowledge was to be of a moral kind, the introspection of our moral nature. Mommsen, comparing the Greek and the Roman, says that when the former ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... best teacher, but the first and the last. But experience must be a dual thing—the experience of others must be used to supplement, correct and justify our own experience; in this way we shall become our own best critics only after we have trained ourselves in self-knowledge, the knowledge of what other minds think, and in the ability to judge ourselves by the standards we have come to believe are right. "If I ought," said ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... him too. His was a career manque: he had failed as a man, and it had broken his nerve as an artist. He was a dabbler now, with—as Heine said of de Musset—a fine future behind him, and none but an artist can tell the bitterness of that self-knowledge. Had he kept his faith with Bassett in spirit as in letter, he might have failed just as decidedly; her daily companionship might have coarsened his inspiration, soured him, driven him to work cheaply, recklessly; but at least he could have accused ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... conditions in man, as well as around him, to which the like justice is done. Such are Special Character, Natural Degree and Vocation, Moral Imperfection, and Limitation of Self-Knowledge. Each of these plays a part of vast importance in life; each is portrayed and used in Goethe's picture. But, though with reluctance, I must merely name and pass them by. Enough to say here, that he sees them and sees through ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... themselves and the world when they could vainly believe that they had realized in their experiences what they thought a compliance with their favorite maxim: "Know thou thyself." Whilst Christians believe and feel that self-knowledge, or the knowledge of one's self, is very important, at the same time they have longing aspirations to know all they can of the Being who created this self, this thinking, reasoning, loving, restless thing within ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... biology by all means dispense with the notion of progress, and consider man along with the other forms of life as subject to mere process. But anthropology, though in a way it is a branch of biology, has a right to a special point of view. For it employs special methods involving the use of a self-knowledge that in respect to the other forms of life is inevitably wanting. Anthropology, in short, like charity, begins at home. Because we know in ourselves the will to progress, we go on to seek for evidences of progress in the history of mankind. Nor need we cease to think ...
— Progress and History • Various
... before all things, a competitive soul who seeks to win rather than to understand or to "live." And to win, or, shall we say, to maintain to oneself the illusion of winning, one must carefully avoid seeing too much. The Russian is light hearted about the forms of truth, but revels in self-knowledge and frank self-declaration, enjoys unbottoming the abysses of his thoughts and feelings, however gloomy. In Russia time and space have no exact importance, living counts for more than dominating life, emotion is not castrated, feelings are openly indulged in; in Russia there are the ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... than this excellent stump-orator. Better off, for a great many reasons; for this reason, were there no other: the silent one is not admired; the silent suspects, perhaps partly admits, that he is a kind of blockhead, from which salutary self-knowledge the excellent stump-orator is debarred. A mouthpiece of Chaos to poor benighted mortals that lend ear to him as to a voice from Cosmos, this excellent stump-orator fills me with amazement. Not empty ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... religion, assumes protection of the most searching social maxims and lends to them the weight of all time, all space, all wonder, and all fear. For many centuries religion held within itself the ripening self-knowledge and self-discipline of the human mind. Now, beside this original agency we have its offshoots, politics, education, legislation, the penal art. And the philosophical sciences, including psychology and ethics, are the especial servants ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... rich very slowly. It was an effect of his prudence. He could command himself even when thrown off his balance. And to become the slave of a treasure with full self-knowledge is an occurrence rare and mentally disturbing. But it was also in a great part because of the difficulty of converting it into a form in which it could become available. The mere act of getting it away from the island piecemeal, little ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... is happiness. To negate everything, to kill one's desires and passions, to tear out of oneself illusions and whims that is the way to attain it. It means to hold fast your soul in the grip of self-knowledge and prevent it from dissipating itself in ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... a piece," said Mr. Cuthcott; "not politics at all, but religion—touches the point of national self-knowledge and faith, the point of knowing what we want to become and of resolving to become it. Your father will tell you that we have no more idea of that at present than a cat of its own chemical composition. As for these ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to thyself take heed, Oft prove your heart, its pages read,— Self-knowledge will, in time of need, Your wants supply; Who knows himself, from dangers ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... stage is a necessary one. We begin with ignorance and the imagination, the material of the pose novel. Later come self-knowledge, disappointments and self-consciousness, and the prodigals of fiction stay themselves upon the husks of epigram and cynicism, and in the place of artless aspiration are indeed in plain black and white very desperate characters. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... trifle nervous during the afternoon. He tried to say to himself that it was because the future of his darling little Mathilde was about to be settled. He shook his head, indicating that to settle the future of the young was a risky business; and then in a burst of self-knowledge he suddenly admitted that what was really making him nervous was the incident of the pier. If Mrs. Wayne referred to it, and of course there was no possible reason why she should not refer to it, Adelaide would never let ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... persons, of the efforts, the pains, the successes of his first year at Murewell. What a ghastly mistake it had all been! He felt a kind of sore contempt for himself, for his own lack of prescience, of self-knowledge. His life looked to him so shallow and worthless. How does a man ever retrieve such a false step? He groaned aloud as he thought of Catherine linked to one born to defeat her hopes, and all that natural pride that a woman feels in the strength and consistency ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was prepared for in the second century,[131] was, from the stand-point of enlightenment and knowledge of nature, a relapse: but it was the expression of a deeper religious need, and of a self-knowledge such as had not been in existence at an earlier period. The final consequences of that revolution in philosophy which made consideration of the inner life the starting-point of thought about the world, only ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... self-knowledge, self-control; These three alone lead life to sovereign power. Yet not for power, (power of herself Would come uncall'd for) but to live by law, 145 Acting the law we live by without fear; And, because right is right, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... around him, and the new tendencies followed by his eminent neighbours Ghiberti, Brunelleschi and Donatello. It was not so; but he only profited by the movement as far as he deemed possible without losing his own sentiment and character; thus giving a rare example of self-knowledge. ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... life has a veneer of godliness nailed thinly over a solid bulk of selfishness. There are many goods in the market finely dressed so as to hide that the warp is cotton and only the weft silk. No Christian man who has memory and self-knowledge can for a moment claim to have reached the height of his ideal; the best of us, at the best, are like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose feet were iron and clay, but we ought to strain after it and to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... arch-master in the arts of intrigue and betrayals, whose duplicity, as if at times intolerable to his self-knowledge, found relief in bursts of cynical openness. "I did hurry on the formation of the proscribing Commission, and I took its presidency. And do you know why? Simply from fear that if I did not take it quickly into my hands my own name would head the list of the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... first-rate Hellenist, published editions of the classics. In later life the affairs of religion absorbed him, and he lived for the idea that reform of the Church depended on a better knowledge of early Christianity, in other words, on better self-knowledge, which could only result from a slow and prolonged literary process. He started from the beginning by his edition of the Greek Testament, begun here, at Queens' in 1512, published at Bale by Froben in 1516. It had already been printed from better MSS. by Cardinal Ximenes ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... remains ignorant of the sublime duty of confession! Still more wretched who, to shun the common herd, as he believes, feels himself called upon to regard it with scorn! Is it not a truth that even when we know what is required of us to be good, that self-knowledge is a dead letter to us? reading and reflection are insufficient to impel us to it; it is only the living speech of a man gifted with power which can here be of avail. The soul is shaken to its centre, ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... met, and lingered in each other's depths. It was their first real greeting since his return; and they felt it as such. It was the first time also that Desmond had seen her completely since his lightning-flash of self-knowledge; and in the same instant the same thought sprang to both their minds—that, in the past three weeks, the detested shade had served them ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... in an honest self-knowledge that he had refused recognition until now. Tender and reassuring words, wild declarations and plans for the future, crowded for expression; nothing else before the immensity of desire that possessed him was of the slightest concern; but not a syllable was spoken. A sharp line was ploughed ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... it is thus that man breaks through the boundary of his merely immediate and unconscious existence, so that, just because he knows himself to be animal, he ceases in virtue of such knowledge to be animal, and, through such self-knowledge only, can characterize ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... strange arrest thine ear? My summons 'twas to bid thee come, Where sole the friend of Nature loves to roam. Ages long past, this drear abode To solitude I sanctified, and God: 'Twas here, by love of Wisdom brought, Her truest lore, Self-knowledge, first I sought; Devoted here my worldly wealth, To win my chosen sons immortal health. Midst these dun woods, and mountains steep, Midst the wild horrors of yon desert deep, Midst yawning caverns, wat'ry dells, Midst long, sequestered aisles, and ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... the man opened his eyes with a dazed expression, at first a blur of consciousness. Then gradually the recognition of himself, of his surroundings, of his life, came into them, and that self-knowledge was unmistakable. There was no doubt about the man with his twisted limbs and his twisted soul. He lay quite still a while longer, staring. Charlotte, with her eyes upon him, and the squirrel with his eyes upon him, never stirred. Charlotte heard her heart beat, and wished for some way ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and hating himself. He looks into his own breast, analyses his faculties, and finds he is only peering into hollow and chaotic vacuity. And then he once more falls from the heights of his eagerly-desired self-knowledge into an ironical scepticism. He divests his struggles of their real importance, and feels himself ready to undertake any class of useful work, however degrading. He now seeks consolation in hasty ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... theological studies into a firm and lasting resolve to make their pursuit the object of his life. Colet urged him to expound the Pentateuch or the prophet Isaiah at Oxford, just as he himself treated of Paul's epistles. Erasmus declined; he could not do it. This bespoke insight and self-knowledge, by which he surpassed Colet. The latter's intuitive Scripture interpretation without knowledge of the original language failed to satisfy Erasmus. 'You are acting imprudently, my dear Colet, in trying to obtain water from a pumice-stone (in the words of Plautus). ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... read a notice of Thackeray, which asserts, as an evidence of his weakness in certain respects, that he imagined himself to be an artist, and persisted in supplying bad illustrations to his own works. This statement does injustice to his self-knowledge. He delighted in the use of the pencil, and often spoke to me of his illustrations being a pleasant relief to hand and brain, after the fatigue of writing. He had a very imperfect sense of color, and confessed that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... is one thing; self-mastery and self-knowledge are quite another. Thus the one is often distorted and always transient; the ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... is a clear-eyed recognition of their nature, and the temptation in some flurry of feeling to take on our shoulders the mistakes of destiny with which we chance to have been involuntarily associated, is one to be resisted in the interests of that self-knowledge which is the beginning of self-development. Before we take the scourge in hand for our own shoulders let us be quite sure ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... "How can you ask, as if you did not know it yourself. Self-knowledge should be our first aim! The ancient philosophers were wise to have inscribed over the entrances to their temples, 'Know thyself,' in order to remind all approaching, to examine themselves before they entered the halls of the gods. Is not the human heart equally a temple? ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... the sounds; in music we live, not as we live ordinarily, within our bodies, but out there, in a rarer and unpractical medium—tone. And in this new region we gain dominion over our feelings, through the order which the form of the music imposes upon them, and also self-knowledge, because, in being externalized in the sounds, our feelings become an object for our reflection and understanding. In music the light of reflection is turned ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... him as well as I once did." We have in these anecdotes a key to the nature of Bunyan's genius. He was a realist, a romanticist, and a humourist. He was as exact a realist (though in a different way) as Mr. Pepys, whose contemporary he was. He was a realist both in his self-knowledge and in his sense of the outer world. He had the acute eye of the artist which was aware of the stones of the street and the crows in the ploughed field. As a preacher, he did not guide the thoughts of his hearers, as so many preachers do, into the wind. He recalled them from ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... "Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control: These three alone lead life to sovereign power, Yet not for power (power of herself Would come uncalled for), but to live by law; Acting the law we ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... intuition, is, he says, "the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and therefore inexpressible" (p. 6). In illustration, he mentions self-knowledge: "there is one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing through time—our self which endures" (p. 8). The rest of Bergson's philosophy consists ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... steady centre of action in the unchangeable nature of the human mind. In general it may be observed that the theory of Kant constructed little; and rather tended to destroy the structures of an empty dogmatism of the understanding and prepare, by means of self-knowledge, the way for a better state of philosophical science; seeking in reason itself the principles on which to distinguish the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... failure to record the praise, and the carefulness to tell the subsequent rebuke, reveal the humble-hearted 'elder' into whom the self-confident young Apostle had grown. Flesh delights to recall praise; faith and self-knowledge find more profit in remembering errors forgiven and rebukes deserved, and in their severity, most loving. How did these questions and their answers serve as introduction to the announcement of the Cross? In several ways. They brought clearly before the disciples the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... effort to eradicate them, is bad science as well as bad morals. Among the items given you by heredity do not forget the potentiality of self-improvement by inward struggle. No one says, 'I can't speak French, and I sha'n't try, because my father was an illiterate Irishman.' Self-knowledge tends to weaken self-discipline, foster self-indulgence, and ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... was not one of those befrilled, fashion-plate dolls that one meets at the after-war crushes and dances, but was austerely simple in dress, with a face which betrayed a spiritual nobility, the very incarnation of modern womanhood, alive with modern self-knowledge, modern weariness ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... And, O child, here it is that the seven celestial rishis with Vasishtha at their head rise and set. Behold that excellent and bright summit of the Meru, where sitteth the great sire (Brahma) with the celestials happy in self-knowledge. And next to the abode of Brahma is visible the region of him who is said to be the really primal Cause or the origin of all creatures, even that prime lord, god Narayana, having neither beginning nor end. And, O king, that auspicious place composed ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... communion with a personal God, was the object of every mystic; and belief in its possibility seems to have been coeval with the genesis of humanity, each people giving it another name. Thus Plato and Plotinus call "Noetic work" that which the Yogi and the Shrotriya term Vidya. "By reflection, self-knowledge and intellectual discipline, the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty—that is, to the Vision of God. This is the epopteia," said the Greeks. "To unite one's soul to the Universal ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... seclusion of the cab he speculated upon her toilette, the colour of her shoes. He thought of the last five weeks, of the next five years. Dwelling on their mutual love and esteem, their health, their self-knowledge and experience and cheerfulness, her sense and grace, his talent for getting money first and keeping it afterwards, he foresaw nothing but happiness for ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... lessons that can be impressed on the human mind, is that of self-knowledge and a just apprehension of what it is that we are competent to achieve. We can do much. We are capable of much knowledge and much virtue. We have patience, perseverance and subtlety. We can put forth considerable energies, and nerve ourselves to resist great obstacles and much suffering. Our ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... he question his own motives with a severer judgment than that of the world, as his scrutiny is more close, and his self-knowledge more minute. He knows the secret sin, the mental act, the spiritual aberration. He knows the distance between his highest effort and that lofty standard of perfection to which he has pledged his purposes. ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... property; and those who seem to doubt, or deny us what is justly ours, let us either pity their prejudices, or despise their judgment. I know, my dear, you will say this is self-conceit; but I call it self-knowledge. The one is theoverweening opinion of a fool, who fancies himself to be what he wishes himself to be thought; the other is the honest justice that a man of sense, who has thoroughly examined the subject, owes to himself. Without this standard, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... achieve nothing. Preventive measures of every practical and sound kind we want, but most of all we need to inculcate the truth that "Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead man ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... form a sound judgment of another is bound to attain as great a measure as possible of accurate self-knowledge, not merely to understand the reaction of the foreign character when brought into relation with his own, but also to make allowance for fundamental differences of taste and temperament. The golden rule of judging others by ourselves can easily become a dull and leaden despotism ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... weeks I was terribly miserable; not so much because I had lost Ellen—a man cannot lose what he has never hoped to possess—as from the ruin of all my illusions. During those days I plucked and ate by the dozen of the fruits of the tree of self-knowledge, and I found them very bitter. I ended by leaving Elmira, to seek my fortunes elsewhere. I knew my trade well. Long practice had taught me how to make the best of my learning, and I never had any difficulty in finding employment. I taught successively in upwards of a dozen States ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... suffering. He simply sank back into himself, and became the man he had been before, plus his experience of feeling, and minus the ingenuousness of his self-knowledge. He took instead to self-mystification, trying to persuade himself that because he could not have Alison, Alison was not worth having. After that, it was but a step to palming off on his reason the monstrous syllogism that because ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Othello—make the world our own, Without a risk to run of either sort? I can't!—to put the strongest reason first. 490 "But try," you urge, "the trying shall suffice; The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!" Spare my self-knowledge—there's no fooling me! If I prefer remaining my poor self, I say so not in self-dispraise but praise. If I'm a Shakespeare, let the well alone; Why should I try to be what now I am? If I'm no Shakespeare, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... between. Catholicism, Roman, its condition in England. Cato, the wisest Roman, a stoic by manners not by conviction. Censor, the office of, suggestion for its establishment in England. Charity, the outcome of self-knowledge. Charles I., Act of, concerning the bishops and the church lands, his trial, sermon on the martyrdom of, his ill-treatment by the Puritans ingratitude to him by the House of Commons history of the events which led to his death Charles the Second's Bounty Cheerfulness, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... and the mother of our child; Aspasia is a wise woman, for she possesses modesty and conscientiousness, self-knowledge and foresight; Aspasia is prudent, for she is silent when wise men speak. But Aspasia can also cause wise men to speak wisely by listening to them; for she helps them to produce thoughts, not like Socrates' midwife, ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... have considered it waste of time to be always weighing herself and her feelings in a nicely-adjusted balance. 'Know thyself,' said an old thinker; but Audrey Ross would have altered the saying: 'Look out of yourself; self-forgetfulness is better than any amount of self-knowledge.' ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... blanket, hallowed by associations of past-life realizations. My divine guru approached and passed his hand over my head. I entered the NIRBIKALPA SAMADHI state, remaining unbrokenly in its bliss for seven days. Crossing the successive strata of self-knowledge, I penetrated the deathless realms of reality. All delusive limitations dropped away; my soul was fully established on the eternal altar of the Cosmic Spirit. On the eighth day I fell at my guru's feet and implored him to keep me always near him in ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... now have felt for a life of public exhibition. My dramatic reading and writing was curiously blended with a very considerable interest in literature of a very different sort, and with the perusal of such works as Mason on "Self-Knowledge," Newton's "Cardiphonia," and a great variety of sermons and religious essays. My mother, observing my tendency to reading on religious subjects, proposed to me to take my first communion. She was a member of the Swiss Protestant Church, the excellent pastor of which, the Rev. Mr. S——, was our ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble |
