Tao Te Ching
Dreamstime
Know Yourself
Most may believe Socrates’ suggestion that we learn to know ourselves is some kind of joke, “Of course, we know ourself!” Evolutionary biologists however, argue that the ability to delude ourselves increases our ability to delude others which makes us more successful in life. This success has produced more offspring which has increased and passed on this particular trait. The Buddhist/Taoist view, on the other hand, explains that there is no separate, independent “self,” that we’re just an aggregate of both harmonizing and conflicting influences. Knowing who and what we really are may be humanity’s least understood question.
Quotes (108)
“Flattery's the food of fools and whoso likes such airy meat, will soon have nothing else to eat.”
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
“That whereby man differs from the lower animals is little. Most people throw it away.”
“He who knows he is a fool is not the biggest fool; He who knows he is confused is not in the worst confusion.”
“I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.”
“Sages understand other individuals by understanding themselves. They understand other families by understanding their own family and therefor understand the whole world.”
“The person who knows not himself, is poor in Spirit, for he is his own poverty.”
“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.”
“Search the Light within your souls, for there will you find the reality of all things.”
“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”
“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.”
“Withdraw into yourself and look. If you do not find yourself beautiful, act as does the creator of a statue who cuts away here, smooths there, makes this line lighter, the other purer until a lovely face has grown upon his work... never cease chiseling your statue until you see the perfect goodness established in the stainless shrine.”
“O fool, know yourself. It is not a matter of meditation, or concentration… the diversity of existence is but a form of thought.”
“Make no mistake: there is nothing on the outside and likewise, nothing on the inside that you can grasp.”
“Original nature is your eternal mind… impervious to gain and loss, calumny and eulogy, praise and blame, sorry and joy”
“Realizing that fully-convinced 'knowing' creates suffering and delusion begins the healing.”
“Man has three souls—an animal soul he shares with animals, a physical soul that links him to plants, and a human, rational soul that is a bond between him and angels.”
“A ruler who is unwilling to hear of his faults can turn loyalty into flattery, while a ruler pleased by straight talk turns flattery into loyalty,”
“For the merchant who ventures afar—unless he takes his own means into account; the enticements of the marketplace will be never-ending.”
“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.”
“Just as many utensils are made from one metal so too are myriad entities made of the fabric of self”
“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
“Many winds full of anger, lust and greed move rubbish around. The solid mountain of true nature however, stays where it's always been.”
“Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.”
“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.”
“One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life, and there is nothing better.”
“All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are”
“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”
“Fear not what they can do to you; greater is he that is in you than he that is in the World”
“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.”
“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
“Oh would some Power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us. It would save us from many mistakes and foolish thoughts.”
“Unless you realize your own mind—no matter which spiritual practices you perform—you're like a beggar who dosn't know that a stone in his fireplace is made of gold and goes around begging”
“Of people there was hurrying to and fro
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,
All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why”
“He who strives with the present strives with a single thing against which he can use his entire strength. He who fights with the future has more dangerous enemy. He can never remain ignorant about himself; he fights with himself.”
“the majority of us scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own arguments or the dullness of our own jokes... by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them”
“We have only one instrument wherewith to know ourselves and our relation to the universe—we have no other—and that instrument is reason.”
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform… Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”
“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.”
“The dream is an inexhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself.”
“Most people are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves. The premature death of millions is primarily traceable to this cause.”
“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.”
“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”
“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.”
“No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.”
“The life of man is a dubious experiment... so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all... We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct.”
“Everyone's life is a journey to themselves. Though none have attained self-realization, all strive for it—some plodding, some with less effort, but all as best they can. Each of us caries the remains of our birth—slime and eggshells—with us to the end.”
“If you become objective to yourself you can see other people objectively, but not before, because before that it will all be colored by your own views, attitudes, tastes, by what you like and what you dislike”
“Ask yourself the question 'Who am I?'… Solve that great problem and you will solve all other problems.”
“The things that make me different are the things that make me.”
“Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they mark our limitations and bounds.”
“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
“... if I could step outside myself
and contemplate the person that I am,
I should know at last what envy is.”
“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” 
“That is what you are, that is what I am, that is what everything in the universe is – beginningless, endless life, infinite, boundless, eternal Life.”
“Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”
“Start by being fully aware of what you think you are. It’ll help you to become aware of what you are in fact.”
“If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.”
“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.”
“Give up all questions except one: 'Who am I?'... Discover all that you are not... understand that on the level of mind, you can only be described in negative terms”
“Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true.”
“We must learn to be different…If Wakan Tanka likes the plants, the animals, even little mice and bugs to do this, how much more will he abhor people being alike, doing the same thing, getting up at the same time, putting on the same kind of store-bought clothes, working in the same office at the same job with their eyes on the same clock and, worst of all, thinking alike all the time.”
“When you are fooled by something else,the damage will not be so big. But when you are fooled by yourself, it is fatal.”
“Who you are is life itself. The knowing and understanding that comes out of that recognition can hold a lot.”
“We are actually fourth dimensional beings in a third dimensional body inhabiting a second dimensional world!”
“It's such a relief to realize that we don't have to be anything.”
“Haunted by regrets from the past,
In fear of future calamities,
We're too upset and confused
To see and appreciate the immediate wonders
Unfolding before our blinded eyes.”
“Go out into the world; walk slow and silent, comprehending all, and by and by your soul, the Universe, will know Itself: the Eternal I.”
“This very moment is the perfect teacher... feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear [are] like messengers that show us exactly where we're stuck.”
“Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego’s display… we have simply created a shop, an antique shop.”
“A tragedy is a comedy misunderstood. Once you realize what you are, there's nothing but gratitude and laughter.”
“I think what everyone should be doing, before it's too late, is committing themselves to what they really want to do with their lives.”
“If you want to know yourself better, you have to bring in something different from someplace else… that’s why we need pictures or literature, or music”
“Most people are so occupied by the external world that they don’t realize that there is a very rich world within themselves.”
“In our unconsciousness we take credit where no credit is due, oblivious to the real source of everything we pretend is ours”
“Like a child at the cinema, we get caught up in the illusion. From this comes all of our vanity, ambition, and insecurity. We fall in love with the illusions we have created and develop excessive pride in our appearance, our possessions, and our accomplishments. It’s like wearing a mask and proudly thinking that the mask is really you.”
“The truth about who we really are, beyond all appearances, is knowledge worth seeking.”
“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”
“The only difference between meditation and ordinary social interaction is that the friend you're gradually coming to know is yourself.”
“By funneling our immense complexity into a reductive profile, we become tricked into thinking that we know ourselves, while missing most of what there is to know. This keeps us spinning in endless loops”
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