"Self-knowledge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... crimes. It had, as it were, only rendered her charity universal, and her benevolence omnipotent. She could not accuse herself, this blessed woman—she could not accuse herself, even in this searching hour of self-knowledge—she could not accuse herself, with all her meekness, and modesty, and humility, of having for a moment forgotten her dependence on her God, or her ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... 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? Is it not true that you have felt more ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... no sign of 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 Alison was unworthy, and Alison was a woman, therefore ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... 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, run off with his neighbour's wife, and left sixty thousand pounds odd in debts behind him; but ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... revealed through Christ has its evidence in itself, and the proof of its divine authority in its fitness to our nature and needs; the clearness and cogency of this proof being proportionate to the degree of self-knowledge in each individual hearer. Christianity has likewise its historical evidences, and these as strong as is compatible with the nature of history, and with the aims and objects of a religious dispensation. And to all these Christianity itself, as an existing power in the world, and Christendom ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... for them, especially in questions of feeling. Whether from 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 ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... himself 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 of the mysterious conditions and laws which surrounded him, the greater the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... about her. She thought confusedly but intensely of many things—the months 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
... 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 that a woman feels in ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of myself, I returned here. Once more I stood on this spot, within the gaze of her deep eyes. I began to believe that a love everlasting, all enduring, had been given me! But still it was passion that pleaded for possession, and still it was self-knowledge that looked ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... to the melodious suggestion of beauty. Nor, as even these scraps show, is the thought below the verse. Even if Hallam's postulate of misplaced and ill-regulated passion be granted (and I am myself very far from granting it), the extraordinary wealth of thought, of knowledge, of nature, of self-knowledge, of clear vision of others in the very midst of the circumstances which might make for unclear vision, is still unmistakable. And if the poet's object was to catch up the sum of love and utter it with or even without any ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Ecclesia, (21) and Thrasybulus made a speech in which, addressing the city party, he said: "Men of the city! I have one piece of advice I would tender to you; it is that you should learn to know yourselves, and towards the attainment of that self-knowledge I would have you make a careful computation of your good qualities and satisfy yourselves on the strength of which of these it is that you claim to rule over us. Is it that you are more just than ourselves? Yet the people, who are poorer—have never wronged you ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... be Montaigne, or become his absolute admirer, 'his umbrage,' 'his semblable,' in order to do justice to him. The whole scene is full of allusions, easily explainable from the point of view we have indicated. So also, the reference to self-knowledge ('to know himself) —an art which Montaigne never learnt and the 'two weapons' with which he fights, are full of ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... ascribes to God affections of feeling as well. The older theology, however, laboured under the impression that feeling and emotion were characteristic only of limited and created personality; it transformed, e.g., the religious idea of the Divine blessedness into eternal self-knowledge, and that of the Divine wrath into a fixed purpose to punish sin." Yes, this logical God, arrived at by the via negationis, was a God who, strictly speaking, neither loved nor hated, because He neither enjoyed nor suffered, an inhuman God, and His justice was a rational or mathematical justice—that ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... the 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, that auspicious place composed of all energies even the celestials, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... tell you that they are sincere; your enemies are really so. Let your enemies' censure be like a bitter medicine, to be used as a means of self-knowledge. ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... "I am not 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 much better man. See now; he has made me arrogant. ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... 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 ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... he entreated; "not now. Let our thoughts be single for this one hour that we shall be alone together. Let it wait for a little, this woeful confession. I think you probably exaggerate your need of it, as young souls are apt to who have not learned to bear the pain of self-knowledge, or self-reproach without knowledge. Let us forget ourselves, and think of ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... 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 refined, the more we ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... that; and, her own knowledge of the hopeless truth, plainly enough, was the key to that note of bitterness which he had detected at times, and even spoken of—that curious maturity forced by unhappy self-knowledge, that apathetic indifference stirred at moments to a quick sensitive alertness almost resembling self-defence. She was aware of her own story; that was certain. And the acid of that knowledge was etching the designs of character upon ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 of twenty-nine, he stood upon the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... flaws nor knots. Many a professing Christian 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 remember that a stain shows most on the whitest robe. What made David's sin glaring and memorable ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... cried unto God out of the depths, will be able to make the house of his soul a fabric which may be a temple of God, and with its shining apex may pierce the clouds and seem almost to touch the heavens. A great poet has told us that the things which lead life to sovereign power are self-knowledge, self-reverence, and self-control. And in a noble sense it is true, but the deepest self-knowledge will lead to self-abhorrence rather than to self-reverence; and self-control is only possible when, knowing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... always am found out; have been; shall be. It's my luck. Other men will carry off bushels of fruit, and get away undetected, unsuspected; whereas I know woe and punishment would fall upon me were I to lay my hand on the smallest pippin. So be it. A man who has this precious self-knowledge will surely keep his hands from picking and stealing, and his feet upon the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 to a ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... midst of active life possess. Hence it is that even Jews 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 need not wake from long slumber, ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... return. "She is coming, she is coming," I said within me. "Back from its glowing south travels the sun of my spring, the glory of my summer." Floating slowly up from the infinite depths of her being, came the conscious woman; up—up from the realms of stillness lying deeper than the plummet of self-knowledge can sound; up from the formless, up into the known, up into the material, up to the windows that look forth on the embodied mysteries around. Her eyelids rose. One look of love all but slew my fear. When I told her my grief, she answered with a smile of pity, yet half of ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... important 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 ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... 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 not southwards, but towards Germany, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... hoped that Madame Recamier did not perceive the inconsistency of which he was totally unconscious. Though Chateaubriand was perpetually analyzing himself and his emotions, no man had less self-knowledge. He was too much absorbed by his "self-study, self-wonder, and self-worship," as one of his critics styles his egotism, to be clear-sighted. He had generous impulses, but no uniform generosity of heart; and while glorying in the few ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... the 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 the reserve of his manner repressed all the ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... adhering to his image of the mountain of self-knowledge, he makes his famous appeal to the Bible, as the supreme test of truth, the only sure guard that the mystic has against being deluded in ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... 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
... setting himself to the task of brushing away all illusions and painting life as sterile and unpicturesque as it is in its meanest, most commonplace conditions. To do this, he claimed, was the stern function of the author. To help his readers to self-knowledge, although it might lessen their happiness, was the greatest service he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Mrs. Hamilton. Mrs. Hamilton, indeed, turned their ill-natured remarks to advantage, for instead of neglecting or wholly despising them, she considered them in her own heart, and in solitary reflection pondered deeply if she in any way deserved them. She knew that the lesson of self-knowledge is never entirely learnt; and she knew too, that an enemy may say that in ill-will or malice which may have some foundation, though our friends, aided by self-love, may have hidden the truth from us. Deeply did this noble woman think on her ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... religion. In default of this, 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
... 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 ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... see her again. In the dark 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
... thoroughly explained in the College of Therapeutics, making thereby a perfect guidance to health, and to progress in philosophy, and supplying the great lack in all systems of education—self-knowledge and the sublime art of health, longevity, and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... "Self-knowledge," laughed Hadrian, "is the climax of wisdom. A man has done something if he has only added a 'thing of beauty' to the joys of a friend's imagination; what others do by hard work you do by mere existence. Be quiet, Argus!" For, while he was speaking, the hound had risen, and had gone snarling to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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, as too probable— His power ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... this 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
... 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 can ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... 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
... Years of the Prince Consort," of one such peaceful evening. "We two dined together. Albert 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 crowded ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... cost him, I believe, far more than the sacrifice of his political prospects. Whatever he may have been in his youth, he was certainly not in mature life an ambitious man. With the great position he held in England the world had little to offer him, and the self-knowledge which was not the least of his many remarkable gifts showed him that party conflict was not the sphere in which Nature intended him to move. With many of the qualities of the highest statesmanship he wanted some necessary ingredients of a great statesman. ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... believed himself. I didn't know what he was playing up to—if he was playing up to anything at all—and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. I made no sound all the time he was wondering what he had better do after "that stupid ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... is one 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
... man, who must be strengthened and freed from 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 secondary ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... knew perfectly well 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 ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and dissipations of his life seem to have been confined to his very earliest days, and to have been the exuberance of a most extraordinary vitality, bursting into existence with such force and vivacity that it had not had time to collect itself, and so come to self-knowledge and control. By many accounts it would appear that the character he sustained in the last years of his life was that of a judicious, common-sense sort of man; a discreet, reputable, and ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... great or small! Labour is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness,—to all knowledge, 'self-knowledge' and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Park to take upon themselves all 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 Harrison says, exceedingly ready, easily run away with it. That it ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... 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 ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... clear, precise, and severe "logic" (the Stoics were the first to use this word). Armed with this weapon, and only employing it for self-knowledge and self-control, man makes himself wise. The "wise man" of the Stoic is a kind of saint—a superman, as it has since been called—very analogous to his God. All his efforts are concentrated on safeguarding, ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... put faith and standards and rules of conduct upon exactly the same level as I put my belief of what is right in art, and what I consider right practice in art. I have arrived at a certain sort of self-knowledge and there are, I find, very distinct imperatives for me, but I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else. One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry or painting ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... my progress by the knowledge of powers in nature of wondrous value, but permanently effective for good only; secrets to be entrusted to those alone whose goodness, discipline, and self-knowledge enable them to stand firmly against the varied attacks of temptation, and rise above the motives by which men are ordinarily ruled, the chosen High Priests of the Science who would never use for ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... quality in it you do not find in the Illiad. Greek and Trojan champions, before beginning the real business of their combats, do their best to impart to each other a little valuable self-knowledge: each reveals carefully, in a fine flow of hexameters, the weak points in his opponent's character. They are equally eloquent about their own greatnesses, which stir their enthusiasm highly;—but as to faults, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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 answer to prayer, the prayer of a ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... 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 several ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... 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 ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... 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. ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... even her bold experiment in democracy. Not upon her has the divine injunction descended: [Greek phrase]. She who knows so much knows not herself. How should she, when she is composed of so many and so diverse elements? And lacking self-knowledge, she lacks humour. With the best will in the world, she cannot see the things about her in a true proportion. The blithe atmosphere, clear as crystal, sparkling as champagne, in which she lives, persuades her to take a too serious and favourable view of her own character. And let it be remembered ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... agony, desire and despair. She 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, ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... redoubled when a coherent agency, such as 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
... the space of a year, this work; no, nor even in ten years."[36] In mathematics, in chemistry, in optics, in mechanics, he was, if not superior, at least equal, to the best of his contemporaries. His confidence in his own powers was the just result of self-knowledge and self-respect. Natural genius, and the accumulations of forty years of laborious study pursued with a method superior to that which guided the studies of others, had set him at the head of the learned men of his time; and he was great enough to know and to claim his place. He had the self-devotion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... 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 ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... who 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, the impressions it receives are ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... 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 ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... eyes 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 ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... 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
... 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, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... privilege to work, 230 And never hear the sound of their own names. But, speaking more in charity, the dream Flattered the young, pleased with extremes, nor least With that which makes our Reason's naked self The object of its fervour. What delight! 235 How glorious! in self-knowledge and self-rule, To look through all the frailties of the world, And, with a resolute mastery shaking off Infirmities of nature, time, and place, Build social upon personal Liberty, 240 Which, to the blind ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... whom, supposing 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 ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... loose discordant notions of Just and Unjust prevailing in the community; sets forth that the Just is also honourable, good, and expedient—the cause of happiness to the just man; urges the importance of Self-knowledge; and maintains that the conditions of happiness are not wealth and power, ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... wife ever heard the truth. Time passed and I proceeded with my life in normal fashion, learning myself and increasing my understanding of human nature. I was never under any domination of passion, but exercised great restraint and found that only by self-knowledge and self-command comes power. I did not seek forbidden fruit, but did not shun it. My life proceeded orderly; I chose the profession of dentist, as being likely to introduce me to people of a more interesting type than my father's acquaintance; and I kept ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... 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
... taking the quiet return of morn and evening—still more the star-like out-glowing of some pure fellow-feeling, some generous impulse breaking our inward darkness—as a salvation that reconciles us to hardship. Those who have a self-knowledge prompting such self-accusation as Hamlet's, can understand this habitual feeling of rescue. And it was felt by Gwendolen as she lived through and through again the terrible history of her temptations, from their first form of illusory self-pleasing when she struggled ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... The self-knowledge which St. Francis possessed in such perfection, prepared him sufficiently for the signal favor which God proposed to confer upon him, according to the principle of St. Augustine, that deep foundations are requisite for a building of ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... 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, ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... 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 already ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... 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 ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... all the original people in those days ended up as caricatures. The Rococo is the conscious humor of the Pigtail; for that reason it can still be used artistically today, whereas the Pigtail, which is totally lacking in the humor of self-knowledge, has long been artistically dead. Even today when a genre-painter wishes to paint real lifelike caricatures he paints them in Rococo costume. Hasenclever's Hieronymus Jobs, for example, would appear to us absolutely exaggerated, if the figures ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... 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 by little, was surrounded by difficulties, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... 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 ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... 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 death, nor ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... 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 all men are born equally good, but that the temptations of the world at length destroy the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... disrupted hollows Wished from out their graves to cast Forth the dead who lay there rotten; Ah, among them I beheld Luis Enius! Heaven be softened! Hide me, hide me, from myself! Bury me in some deep corner Of earth's centre! Let me never See myself, since no self-knowledge Have I had! But now I have it; Now I know I am that monster Of rebellion, who defied, In my madness, pride, and folly, God Himself; the same, whose crimes Are so numerous and so horrid, That it were slight punishment, If the whole wrath of the ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... there is very little piety in the world; forgetting that, were he to find a church of immaculate purity, his own connection with it would introduce corruption. Should such a person conceive it to be his duty to tell you all your faults, woe betide you! for desirable as self-knowledge is, it is no kindness to have our faults aggravated a hundred-fold, and concentrated before our minds like the converging rays of the sun, in one focal blaze, nor poured upon our heads like the sweeping torrent, nor eked out like the incessant patterings ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... 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 bound to understand strategy, and devoutly held that Wellington's ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... and imagination and all the shackles of merely practical needs and disabilities. Here too it fixed the idea or the ideal. 'Life without reflection upon life, without self-examination and self-study and self-knowledge, is a life not worth living by man.' In doing so it revealed a self deeper than the physical being of man and an environment wider and more real—more stable and permanent—than the physical cosmos, finding ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... was all of flesh; but his demands for the rectitude of mankind pointed out like the muzzles of cannon through the embrasures of his virtues. To demolish evil!—that seemed the finest of aims; and even as a physician, that was, most likely, his motive until later years and a better self-knowledge had taught him that to do good was still finer and better. He waged war—against malady. To fight; to stifle; to cut down; to uproot; to overwhelm;—these were his springs of action. That their results were good proved that ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... 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 as they always were even ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... their right as because it is their duty. We have also proposed to open new avenues of employment to women—to make them less dependent and less burdensome—to lift them out of unwomanly self-distrust and disqualifying diffidence into womanly self-respect and self-knowledge. To teach them to make all work honorable, by each doing the share that falls to her, or that she may work out to herself agreeably to her own special aptitude, cheerfully and faithfully—not going down to it, but bringing it ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Blessed with response instant, miraculous; For in that hour my spirit was at one With Him who knows and satisfies her needs. The supplication and the blessing sprang From the same source, inspired divinely both. I prayed for light, self-knowledge, guidance, truth, And these like heavenly manna were rained down To feed my hungered soul. His guilt was mine. What angel had been sent to stay mine arm Until the fateful moment passed away That would have ushered an eternity Of withering remorse? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... of the minister's barn under the elms on the hill Cynthia pulled the harness from the tired horse with an energy that betokened activity of mind. She was not one who shrank from self-knowledge, and the question put itself to her, "Whither was this matter tending?" The fire that is in strong men has ever been a lure to women; and many, meaning to play with it, have been burnt thereby since the world began. But to turn the fire. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 take ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... they arrive at that which is nothing else than the doctrine of the supreme beauty itself, in the knowledge and contemplation of which at length they repose." (Shelley's translation) Love, beauty, and self-knowledge are keywords not only in Plato but in Shelley's thought and poetry, and he was much concerned with the problem of the presence of good and evil. Some of these themes are discussed by Woodville in Mathilda. The repetition may have been one reason ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... 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
... longer than usual, and she had not heard from him. Toby, her lover! Only when she had been a little frightened or distressed had she longed for his protective arms. Otherwise he had slipped into a sure place in her self-knowledge. He was the man she loved, strong and rough, the first to capture her heart, and until now the only man to hold her imagination. At the thought of deserting him Sally shrank. She belonged to Toby. Toby belonged to her. She had been going to marry him. If she had not loved Toby she would ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... 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 upon his temperament. How different ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... upon experience, and finds firm footing for his faith in the present; although he acknowledges that the "profound of ignorance surges round his rockspit of self-knowledge." ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... The best repentance for our sins 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 that we ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... philosophical contemplation of the relations of mind and body. Self-culture implies not only a knowledge of the powers of the mind, but also how to direct and use them for its own improvement, and he who has the key to self-knowledge, can unlock the mysteries of human nature and be eminently serviceable to the worlds For centuries the mind has been spreading out its treasury of revelations, to be turned to practical account, in ascertaining the constitution, and determining better methods of treating disease. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... 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 ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... first teachers of antiquity who led the way to that self-knowledge which is of the essence of conscience, and in the 'Daemon,' or inner voice, which he claimed to possess, some writers have detected the trace {70} of the intuitive monitor of man. Plato's discussion of the question, 'What is the highest good?' involves the capacity of moral judgment, and his ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... 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 ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... reflected not only in the mirror, but on the blade of a knife, or a puddle in the road; and, if we look sharply enough, in the eyes of other men—even in the expression of their faces. In such manner does Nature force upon us a recognition of our various personalities—the nucleus of self-knowledge, and self-respect. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... share all this spiritual profit and intellectual delight with your Sabbath evening congregations, and with your young men's and young women's classes? Why should you not introduce Santa Teresa to her daughters in Edinburgh? For her daughters they are, so soon and as long as they live in self-knowledge and in self-denial, in humility and in meekness, and especially in unceasing prayer for themselves and for others. And I am not without some assurance that in this present lecture I am both hearing and obeying one of those same locutions that Teresa ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... little touch 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. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... 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
... the usual unthinking female. I neither want her instructed in false modesty, lying, nor the deception of the male sex. It is on the male virtues that I want the accent placed; bravery, honesty, self-knowledge, and responsibility for her words and conduct; good manly virtues that most women know only as words of ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... 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 be able to speak ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... had said, he could not bear it—few could. Few even among women—of men much fewer. One great renunciation is possible, sometimes easy, as death may be; but to "die daily?" In youth, too, with all the passions vehement, the self-knowledge and self-control small? No; Nature herself, in that universal desire to escape, which comes with such a trial, hints at the unnaturalness of the ordeal; in which, soon or late, the weak become paralysed or callous; the strong—God help them!—are ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the observation of the world. 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 be defined nor described. Of the three laws of thought the first (All A A) is ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... with drink, struck a pitch above mere vanity. He became candid and explanatory; sought to take his auditors entirely into his confidence, and tell them his inmost conviction about himself. Between his self-knowledge, which was considerable, and his vanity, which was immense, he had created a strange hybrid animal, and called it by his own name. How he would plume his feathers over virtues which would have gladdened ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ill-prepared to face them, and now ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... 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
... defined as a "systematized sequence of experiences through which the child grows into self-knowledge, clear observation, and conscious perception of the whole circle of relationships," and the symbols of his play become at length the truth itself, bound fast and deep in heart knowledge, which is deeper and rarer than ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Not a 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 of his; they are big with prophecy; they announce, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... fellowman. The heathen 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 ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... himself, says our Lord, and we need no more than that to be told us to foresee how all his outside religion will end. 'Without self- knowledge,' says one of the greatest students of the human heart that ever lived, 'you have no real root in yourselves. Real self-knowledge is the root of all real religious knowledge. It is a deceit and a mischief to think that the Christian doctrines can either be understood or aright accepted by any outward means. It is just in proportion as we search our own hearts ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... course, he didn't mean it. Indeed, it is too much a habit among little boys, ay, and among grown-up people, too, to say what they don't mean, as no doubt you are aware, dear reader, if you possess half the self-knowledge we give you credit for; and we cannot too strongly remonstrate with ourself and others against the practice— leading, as it does, to all sorts of absurd exaggerations, such as gravely asserting that we are "broiling hot" when we are simply ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... would treat any other writer, and ask simply how a dramatic author is most apt to reveal himself. A great dramatist may not paint himself for us at any time in his career with all his faults and vices; but when he goes deepest into human nature, we may be sure that self-knowledge is his guide; as Hamlet said, "To know a man well, were to know himself" (oneself), so far justifying the paradox that dramatic writing is merely a form of autobiography. We may take then as a guide this first criterion that, in his masterpiece of psychology, the dramatist ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... 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 has waited." Ever since an ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... 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
... is the affected talker to be found. He is sometimes met with in those who are supposed to have acquired such attainments in self-knowledge and education as to lift them above this objectionable habit. A clergyman of considerable popularity on a certain occasion was observed to give utterance to his thoughts thus, "The sufferings of the poo-ah increase with the approach of wint-ah; ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... analysis, and which our analysis cannot reach, vital force, generic form, spirit of the nation, or God's thought, is for the present a matter of scientific indifference. All the more necessary are the self-knowledge and honesty, in general, which admit the existence of this background, and which do not, by denying it, deny the connection of the whole, which is, for the most part, much more important than the analyzed parts. But I must at the same time, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... 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 of being shunned ...
— The Madman • Kahlil Gibran
... one ever, in the hidden depths of the mind, mistake the cinders of a consumed anguish for the stars of peace? A man need not be a prophet in order to foresee the effect of certain measures on his own character. Indeed, if self-knowledge be not regarded as a sentinel to the judgment, its laborious acquisition would be worth the travail of no honest will. Gained, it remains like an interdict upon all undertakings, projects, ambitions, setting forth clearly all that one may, or may not, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... make application of that blood to their own consciences, either seriously or pertinently. Though the river and fountain of Christ's blood run by them, in the daily preaching of the gospel, yet being destitute of this daily self-inspection and self-knowledge, being altogether ignorant of themselves, they can no more wash here than those who never heard of this blood. They being strangers to themselves, sets them at as great distance and estrangement from the blood of Christ, as if they were wholly strangers to the very preaching of ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... aspect of this right estimate of one's gifts is, if we fully render the Apostle's words, as the Revised Version does, 'so to think as to think soberly.' There is to be self-knowledge in order to 'sobriety,' which includes not only what we mean by sober-mindedness, but self-government; and this aspect of the apostolic exhortation opens out into the thought that the gifts, which a just estimate of ourselves pronounces ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... industry and well-planned methods for the elevation and benefit of man in his highest capacities as well as in his humblest. And he further sought to teach them how to know; to make them understand that difficult achievement of self-knowledge, to know what it is to know; to give the first attempted chart to guide them among the shallows and rocks and whirlpools which beset the course and action of thought and inquiry; to reveal to them the "idols" which unconsciously ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... have the faculty of depredation only half-developed, are the foes of truth, and it is well to remember that the autobiography of a rascal is tainted at its source. A congenial pickpocket, equipped with the self-knowledge and the candour which would enable him to recognise himself an outlaw and justice his enemy rather than an instrument of malice, would prove a Napoleon rather than a Vaux. So that we must e'en accept our Newgate Calendar with its many faults upon its head, and be content. ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... such things must be. It knows that, but for storms, the constant heat of the sun would dry it up! It imbues itself with its own life—pets and punishes itself like a favourite child. It is only in that highest state of self-knowledge that a man can appreciate the ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... 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 ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... cannot give up these strong temptations tugging at his heart; why not extend more charity to others, and shew more candour in speaking of himself? There is either a good deal of bigoted intolerance with a deplorable want of self-knowledge in all this; or at least an equal degree of ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... 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 ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... one result of the war will be to bring us a greater self-knowledge, to the violinist as well as to every other artist, a broader appreciation of what he can do to increase and elevate appreciation for music in general and his Art in particular. And with these I am sure a new impetus will be given to the development ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... Salutations to thy form of Might! Thou stupefiest all creatures by the bonds of affection and love for the continuance of the creation. Salutations to thee in thy form of stupefaction.[152] Regarding that knowledge which is conversant with the five elements to be the true Self-knowledge (for which yogins strive), people approach thee by knowledge! Salutations to thee in thy form of Knowledge! Thy body is immeasurable. Thy understanding and eyes are devoted to everything. Thou art infinite, being beyond all measures. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... as much as I warnt to see," returned the traveller, with an emphasis on, and a pronunciation of, the word we have italicised, that cannot be committed to paper, but which were eloquence itself on the subject of self-satisfaction and self-knowledge. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... also experienced as 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 ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... 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 like thee ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... To impute bad motives, indeed, when good are just as probable, is to be wanting in the scientific spirit, which views every subject in 'a dry light.' Nor can we help 'judging others by ourselves'; for self-knowledge is the only possible starting-point when we set out to interpret the lives of others. But to understand the manifold combinations of which the elements of character are susceptible, and how these are determined by the breeding ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... 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 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... for wanting the first child apply in the case of the second, and to them are added more. What was in the first instance simply a hope and a vague if powerful urge has now grown into a conscious desire, based on the self-knowledge and experience gained from loving and looking after the first child. We have had a real taste of the joys of home and family building, and now nothing short of economic catastrophe is likely to stop us from building higher. I assume, of course, that the mother did ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... of 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 ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon |
