Tao Te Ching
Tao Te Ching
Chapter 33Know Yourself
Chapter 33
Those who know others are clever,
Those who know themselves are wise.
Those who conquer others are briefly powerful,
Those who conquer themselves are always strong.
Those who know they have enough are rich,
Ambition wanders blind.
Those who stay where they have found their true home flourish.
Our bodies disappear
But the eternal present goes on and on.
Commentary
“A seed that sprouts at the foot of its parent tree remains stunted until it is transplanted… Every human being, when the time comes, has to depart to seek his fulfillment in his own way.”
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“Every man carries two bags about him, one in front and one behind, and both are full of faults. The bag in front contains his neighbors' faults, the one behind his own. Hence it is that men do not see their own faults, but never fail to see those of others.”
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“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”
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“When in early antiquity Fu Xi ruled the world, he looked upward and contemplated the images in the heavens; he looked downward and contemplated the patterns on earth… He proceeded directly from himself and indirectly from objects. Thus he invented the eight trigrams”
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“Knowing the other and knowing oneself,
In one hundred battles no danger.
Not knowing the other and knowing oneself, one victory for one loss.
Not knowing the other an not knowing oneself, in every battle certain defeat.”
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“know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves… The unexamined life is not worth living.”
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“The ten thousand things are all within us.”
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“If someone can conquer others, it is only by using force. If someone can conquer their own desires, no one in the world can compete with them. Hence we call them strong.”
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“the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty.”
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“The person who knows not himself, is poor in Spirit, for he is his own poverty.”
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“Search the Light within your souls, for there will you find the reality of all things.”
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“O fool, know yourself. It is not a matter of meditation, or concentration… the diversity of existence is but a form of thought.”
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“Perception means to distinguish. Wisdom means to remove obstructions. As long as our distinguishing mind is present, we can only know others, but not ourselves.”
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“Elsewhere, Lao-tzu extols simplemindedness and weakness over wisdom and strength. Why then does he extol wisdom and strength here? Wisdom and strength are for dealing with the inside. Simplemindedness and weakness are for dealing with the outside.”
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“Amazed at the heights of mountains, the ocean’s wideness, the power of nature, and the distance of stars; ourselves we consider not.”
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“It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.”
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“Know your strongest quality and cultivate it. Everyone would have excelled at something if they had known their strongest qualities but most do violence to themselves trying to be someone else.”
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“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”
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“Good Sense is a thing all need, few have, and none think they lack.”
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“Just trust yourself and you'll learn the art of living.”
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“Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.”
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“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
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“The refuge of radiant awareness is closer, more profound, easier, and more wondrous than we can imagine.”
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“be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.”
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“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”
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“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.”
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“It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.”
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“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.”
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“Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.”
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“We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.”
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“The things that make me different are the things that make me.”
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“Doubtless like all of us he was many men, turned on one or another of his selves as occasion required, and kept his real self a frightened secret from the world.”
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“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”
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“It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.”
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“When you are fooled by something else,the damage will not be so big. But when you are fooled by yourself, it is fatal.”
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“By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”
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“We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.”
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“It's such a relief to realize that we don't have to be anything.”
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“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.”
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“Lao Tzu is not saying that immortality or even longevity is desirable. The religion called Taoism has spent much imagination on ways to prolong life interminably or gain immortality… but the Lao Tzu who wrote this had no truck with such notions.”
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“Spiritual practice is stepping out of the duality of me-ness and my-ness as opposed to otherness, of who is me and who is not me.”
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“Trying to please everybody is impossible - if you did that, you'd end up in the middle with nobody liking you. You've just got to make the decision about what you think is your best, and do it.”
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Comments (1)
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Shan Dao
6 years ago
The last line here, “Our bodies disappear but the eternal present goes on and on” has some interesting translations. Lau and Le Guin are similar: “He who lives out his days has lived long enough.” And To live until you die is to live long enough” but both seem not quite deep enough to catch Lao Tzu’s meaning. Red Pine seems to go a little further: “those who aren’t affected by death live long” and Gia-Fu Feng more so: “To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.” (This was the inspiration for our “the eternal present.”) Bynner has a similar take, “ Vitality cleaves to the marrow leaving death behind.”
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