"Self-knowledge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... equal opportunity for out-of-door exercises and especially sports, practise is sometimes hygienic almost inversely to its amount, while even lameness from initial excess has its lessons, and the sense of manifoldness of inferiorities brought home by experiences gives a wholesome self-knowledge and stimulus. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... 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 ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... faithfully repeat the cry 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 ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... In the first place, I don't think he more than half suspects his talent. The flame is smouldering, but it is never fanned by the breath of criticism. He sees nothing, hears nothing, to help him to self-knowledge. He 's hopelessly discontented, but he does n't know where to look for help. Then his mother, as she one day confessed to me, has a holy horror of a profession which consists exclusively, as she supposes, in making ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... 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? Is it not true that you have felt ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... 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 dragged up ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God! Consciousness of God is self- consciousness; by his God, you know the man, and by the man, his God: the two are identical! Religion is merely the consciousness which a man has of his own, not limited, but infinite, nature; it is an early form of self-knowledge. God is the objective nature ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... philosophers supposed they had done their whole duty to 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 them, called a living soul. ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... dissatisfied. Addison's criticisms on 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... public 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 ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... thing; self-mastery and self-knowledge are quite another. Thus the one is often distorted and always transient; the other ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... which 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 now began to be developed. The ideas of a divine, gracious ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... robe, and on the strength of his seventy years of experience and 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 and punishes.[25] We are ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... orders, of Oxford scenes and Oxford 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 ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bare idea of it. This, though he expressed it differently, was what he meant when he resolved once for all that he would never marry, never put himself in any woman's power again. And in the plenitude of his self-knowledge he knew exactly how far he could let himself go without either of these ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... thus apprized 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 to be known ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... made this vision of the higher imagination a true part of our self-knowledge, in such fashion that the soul is purged of envy for what is distinguished, and we feel ourselves fellows with the preserving, rather than the destroying, forces of time, is to be raised into the nobility of the intellect. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... 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 in the fifth volume of ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... the unconscious effect of the supremacy of aristocratic values and of the belief in "origin," the mark of a period which may be designated in the narrower sense as the MORAL one: the first attempt at self-knowledge is thereby made. Instead of the consequences, the origin—what an inversion of perspective! And assuredly an inversion effected only after long struggle and wavering! To be sure, an ominous new superstition, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of his character, was a hidden, yet a restless ambition: but this was perhaps, at present, a secret even to himself. We know not our own characters till time teaches us self-knowledge: if we are wise, we may thank ourselves; if we are ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dynamic mind-images, which make up the entire history of the personal man, is a part of the mechanism which the Self employs, to mirror itself in a reflection, to embody its powers in an outward form, to the end of self-expression, selfrealization, self-knowledge. Therefore the initial impulse behind these dynamic mind- images comes from the Self and is the descending ray of the Self; so that it cannot be said that there is any first member of the series of images, from which the rest arose. The impulse is beginningless, since it comes ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... The failure of 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 ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... it might seem an easy task to break the bond that burdened and assume the tie that blessed. But Sylvia had grown wise in self-knowledge, timorous through self-delusion; therefore the greater the freedom given her the more she hesitated to avail herself of it. The nobler each friend grew as she turned from one to the other, the more impossible ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell On the beauty of Uriel; In heaven once eminent, the god Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud; Whether doomed to long gyration In the sea of generation, Or by knowledge grown too bright To hit the nerve of feebler sight. Straightway, a forgetting wind Stole over the ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 only vaguely ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... 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 ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... expressing the ideas which her life and society have stirred in his logical mind. But Mr. Wells has felt this national life within himself; he has known it by conscious and subconscious experience, this experience being with him a kind of instinct developing into self-knowledge, and so into a more objective and philosophical perception. You can tell from Mr. Shaw's light, debonair, and laughing manner, just as you might guess from his rather hard and unemotional writing, that experience of living has laid no heavy toll ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... nothing of lasting value without self-knowledge. The only living art is that which grows out of one's own experiences. It is just the same with teaching; it is quite impossible to develop others until one has proved one's own powers in every direction, until one has learnt to conquer ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... essays, I thought of while you were reading, about remorse and religious melancholy. He speaks of mixing up religion and morality; and then goes on to say, that Calvinistic notions have obscured and prevented self-knowledge. {42} ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... 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 ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... 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 ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... 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 of his manner ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Nature of Women; Education of Girls; Education of the Affections; On the Development of the Desire for Intellectual Progress; Speech and Writing; Attention and the Power of Adaptive Combination; Development of Wit; Development of Reflection, Abstraction, and Self-Knowledge; On the Education of the Recollection—not of the Memory; Development of the Sense of Beauty; Classical Education, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... 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 freed, Where'er ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... that the wrong had wrecked 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 fate, circumstance, a boyish error, whereas ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 extremes ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... teach valuable lessons as to the meaning of work in the world, but they cannot replace technical schools and apprenticeship in actual life, which are the real schools of work. Manual training can and ought to be used in these schools, but as a means and not as an end—to quicken intelligence and self-knowledge and not to teach carpentry; just as arithmetic is used to train minds ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... ironwork for instance, the overflow of Italian genius was traceable. These things 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 ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... wagered in her heart that the dialogue she provoked upon Crossjay would expose the Egoist. And there were other motives, wrapped up and intertwisted, unrecognizable, sufficient to strike her with worse than the flush of her self-knowledge of wickedness when she detained him to speak of Crossjay ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of one's powers cannot be reached, until one has become deeply interested in some project and loaded with responsibility in regard to it. But by humbly and diligently observing one's better tendencies, and by giving full expression to them, one may attain a fair degree of self-knowledge. One of the special duties of teachers and parents is to come to the assistance of young people in such study, helping them to recognize their strong and weak points and to understand themselves ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... at the quiet self-sufficiency with which "I have been determined to try myself" follows the information that "so many great scholars in all ages" have failed. It is an admirable spirit, when accompanied by common sense and uncommon self-knowledge. When I was an undergraduate there was a little attendant in the library who gave me the following,—"As to cleaning this library, Sir, if I have spoken to the Master once about it, I have spoken fifty times: but it is of no use; he will not employ littery men; ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... returning energy. Magdalen from a distance noted the change. Wentworth for the first time was interested in what Colonel Bellairs was saying. His own voice, which had become almost extinct, revived. There was also a hint of spring in the air. Not being a person of much self-knowledge, he mentioned that fact ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... 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 live ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... than whom none could conduct a conversation better in a novel, or make more living the clash of various minds in a critical event, whether in a cottage or a palace; whom one would select as most likely to write a drama well—had self-knowledge enough to understand, after his early attempts, that true dramatic work was beyond his power. Wordsworth also made one effort, and then said good-bye to drama. Coleridge tried, and staged Remorse. It failed and deserved to fail. To read it is to know that ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... later, his resolution to keep away from Sigmundskron would break down, as much through the insistance of Greif and Hilda, as on account of his own inclinations. Here, too, the humanity of the man showed itself, as well as the weakest points in his self-knowledge and reasoning. Rex might and could have left Sigmundskron then, and his courage would assuredly have kept him away longer than he suspected, even long enough, perhaps, to cool the heat of his passion and make his return both possible and safe. Had he been called upon to decide the case for another ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... windy blockhead there who kept silent but is better off 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 these musical wind-utterances ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... 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
... there, filling her brain and heart with suggestions, till—as she had thought almost without reason, and at haphazard—she chose Beni-Mora as the place to which she would go in search of recovery, of self-knowledge. It had been pre-ordained. The Messenger had been sent. The Messenger had guided her. And he would come again, when the time was ripe, and lead her on into the Desert. She ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... absentia, by Hope College, Holland, Michigan (the only Dutch college in the United States). 1911: Founded, with others, The Child Federation of Philadelphia. 1912: Published: The Edward Bok Books of Self-Knowledge; five volumes: Fleming H. Revell Company. 1913: Founded, with others, The Merion Civic Association, at Merion, Pennsylvania. 1915: Published Why I Believe in Poverty: Houghton, Mifflin Company. 1916: Published poem, God's Hand, set to music by Josef Hofmann: ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... behind her, of Jerry, of Mrs. Draper, of her yellow dress, of her mother—of herself. In the lucidity of those silent hours of wakefulness she experienced for a time the piercing, regenerating thrust of self-knowledge. For a moment the full-beating pulses of her youth slackened, and between their throbs there penetrated to her perplexed young heart the rarest of human emotions, a sincere humility. If she had not ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... As I have said, the novel is the most popular of his works, and every one will remember the figure of the simple, joyous, sensuous young Italian, who is not so much a man as a child, and not so much a child as a charming, innocent animal, and how he is brought to self-knowledge and to a miserable conscious manhood, by the commission of a crime. Donatello is rather vague and impalpable; he says too little in the book, shows himself too little, and falls short, I think, of being a creation. But he is enough of a creation to make us enter into the situation, and the whole ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... 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 of being shunned ...
— The Madman • Kahlil Gibran
... philosophers with 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 only ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... find in the tablets of 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 of the superior ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... substance 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 ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... 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 all ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... with conquest, Horatius lost his self-possession. Often do we find heroes, who can subdue their enemies in the field, the weakest of the weak, when the combat is against their own evil passions. Self-knowledge, and self-possession, are most important acquirements. They are excellencies I must earnestly desire for each of you, my dear children. But we have not time for further conversation to-night: you have all exerted yourselves extremely to-day, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... friend, 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, who only brings ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... them too dull to comprehend the evolutions of our minds, we occasionally use for our amusement, possess an instinctive insight far keener than that of experience, enabling them to read our very souls with an accuracy which puts our self-knowledge to the blush, and might quite turn the tables upon us, could they themselves but appreciate ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... seven mind-born sons of Brahma, of whom Daksha was the seventh. 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, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of observation the something which we count the moral factor in life, and then proceed to investigate the morals of trade? Evidently we must in every ethical enquiry start by taking sides with that trend of the Race-Will in us, which moves plainly towards an ever-increasing self-knowledge, self-reverence and self-control on the part of man. For it is this race-will in us whereby we have the capacity and interest to call any line of conduct or any disposition of the mind good or bad, right ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... added, after a long pause, now looking with calm eyes upon her friend, "and life-experiences correct my judgment and chasten my feelings, I see all things in a new aspect. I understand my own heart better—its needs, capacities and yearnings; and self-knowledge is the key by which we unlock the mystery of other souls. So a deeper self-acquaintance enables me to look deeper into the hearts of all around me. I erred in marrying Mr. Emerson. We were both too hasty, self-willed and tenacious ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... when describing the condition of Ireland about the year 1170, says, "The state of the Celtic people was beyond all hope of self-amendment. The want of law, order and justice, the absence of self-knowledge and self-control, paralysed their national action and reduced the power of ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... should 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, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Intelligence—such is the theme through its various fluctuations. This man of Nature, however, we are always to consider from his negative side, as hostile to a civilized order; so the poet has carefully represented him. He is to be put down; yet even Polyphemus has his right, he is brought to a gleam of self-knowledge, and Ulysses has to pay the penalty of his deed, which has also its curse. A very deep current runs through the poem in this part, which we shall divide into five different scenes, hoping thus to make its movement and thought somewhat ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... one of 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 ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... 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 ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... 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 Harrison says, exceedingly ready, easily run away with it. That ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... launches from the shore; Before he builds, computes the cost; And in no proud pursuit is lost: 10 He learns the bounds of human sense, And safely walks within the fence. Thus, conscious of his own defect, Are pride and self-importance check'd. If then, self-knowledge to pursue, Direct our life in every view, Of all the fools that pride can boast, A coxcomb claims distinction most. Coxcombs are of all ranks and kind: They're not to sex or age confined, 20 Or rich, or poor, or great, or ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... 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 good people here to-night—I don't want to be disrespectful, but if ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to face his own basest self?" the culprit demanded. "If any one is so bold, I fear I must accuse him (or even her) of lack of self-knowledge rather than ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... primal passions beneath the surface of this outward life, chaining them there like leashed tigers in the dark.... Two faces of women appeared to be looking on, while he strove to unravel the snarl of his self-knowledge. Lydia's unworldly face, wearing a faint nimbus of unimagined self-immolation, and Fanny's—full of love and solicitude, the face which he had almost determined ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... 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 ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... words, in understanding their divine heroism he understands himself. For this in truth it seems to me to mean: all knowledge is a revelation of the self to the self, and our deepest comprehension of the seemingly apart divine is also our farthest inroad to self-knowledge; Prometheus, Christ, are in every heart; the story of one is the story of all; the Titan and the Crucified ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... 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 and divine forgiveness. The very greatest and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... own individual development and to forge his own character. We cannot stop him if we would. It is very lucky that we cannot. It is better that we should not stop him even if we could; nevertheless, he has very little self-knowledge and still less self-control. Impulses well up from changes going on within him or from stimuli which come to him from without. He does not understand them. He does not know where they come from. He does not know what they mean. He is ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... hospital bed and stared at 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 ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... as he imagined. In the discussion of a great question with his equals in station, perhaps he finds he has his superiors in intellect. These are the means by which the mind of man is brought to a healthy state, by which that self-knowledge that always has been lauded by sages may be most securely attained. It is a rule of universal virtue, and from the senate to the counting-house will be found of universal application. Then, to the youth ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... exclusively. At Dr Stanhope's he had 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 baby's ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope |
