Top 1200 Knowing Oneself Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

It is necessary to dig deep within oneself to discover the hidden grain of steel called will.

To contemplate a thing implies maintaining oneself OUTSIDE it, resolved to keep a distance between it and ourselves.

Life in New York is one of succumbing to a tidal wave of control and direction, of numbing oneself to emotion.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Things are not as we would like them to be. There is only one way to deal with it, namely to try and be all right oneself.

I think closing-off is the most detrimental thing we can do as people. Also, the idea of not judging oneself.

In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.

The outflow that comes from giving of oneself opens the door to spiritual unfoldment while the attitude of taking locks it.

What is a memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself.

People don't acknowledge loneliness in themselves, and don't appreciate its benefits, the reflection and attentiveness that come with it, the deepened acquaintance with oneself.

Don't aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Lovers and mystics are familiar with this sense of grandeur, this taste of joy - in abandoning oneself to the will of others.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don't think they're doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

Perhaps the basic thing which contributes to charm is the ability to forget oneself and be engrossed in other people.

I believe in reinventing oneself if one has messed up and is repentant and actually makes an effort to change for the better, I'm all about that.

Without the ambition to raise oneself to life's challenges, growth and innovation would never happen.

I remember reading in a comedy book very long ago when I first started, a person said there's a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.

All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.

To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments.

When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful. Truth is more important than modesty.

Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.

Thus one should know oneself to be of the nature of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss[Sat-Chit-Ananda].

Healing fails to occur because it is much easier to injure another than to heal oneself.

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.

...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.

What we love intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel, and to assert as part of oneself.

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

Teaching for creativity aims to encourage self-confidence, independence of mind, and the capacity to think for oneself.

To defy the authority of empirical evidence is to disqualify oneself as someone worthy of critical engagement in a dialogue.

There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved.

First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

For the possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices.

The enormous pitfall is devotion to oneself instead of to life. All works that are self-devoted are absolutely ineffective.

Get to know yourself. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them from what you see. Know also when you actually have thought through to the nature of the thing with which you are dealing and when you are not thinking at all... Knowing yourself and knowing the facts, you can judge whether you can change the situation so it is more to your liking. If you cannot--or if you do not know how to improve on things--then discipline yourself to the adjustments that will be necessary.

The old shepherd was right: The only solution was to forget a part of uncertainty and create a new history for oneself.

..the real world's all we've got. Believers in the supernatural claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?

One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way; and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

Sometimes the child in one behaves a certain way and the rest of oneself follows behind, slowly shaking its head.

Fashion is not superficial; it is a dynamic tool to transform oneself, and it can be used to command the attention of those around you.

One should oblige everyone to the extent of one's ability. One often needs someone smaller than oneself.

It's an imaginative thing we do; it's about immersing oneself in one's imagination. If you're a novelist, you do it with pen and paper. We do it with our bodies.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

The place one's in, though, doesn't make any contribution to peace of mind: it's the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself.

To work effectively as an agent of change in a pluralistic society, it is necessary to be able to connect with people different from oneself.

Experience has shown me that standing by oneself reading from one's book isn't especially compelling - unless you're David Sedaris.

Character is the final decision to reject whatever is demeaning to oneself or to others and with confidence and honesty choose what is right.

I came to music and knowing a little bit about life, and I came to music knowing a lot about business - and that's a real advantage. By the time I came to music, I had purchased real estate, opened restaurants, and been in the business world, so the music business didn't blindside me.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.

To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.

It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.

In the killing of animals there is cruelty, rage, and the accustoming of oneself to the bad habit of shedding innocent blood.

To be forced to defend oneself is an inherently undesirable position to be in. The focus shifts from ideas to the person conveying them.

Great art is created only through diligent and painstaking effort to perfect and polish oneself.

Success, like happiness, is the unexpected side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.