"Self-knowledge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one thing; self-mastery and self-knowledge are quite another. Thus the one is often distorted and always transient; the other constructive, ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... manuscript, and an index to some of them might be found in the ornaments of the room. She had always combined a love of serious and poetical reading with her skill in fancy-work, and the neatly-bound copies of Dryden's 'Virgil,' Hannah More's 'Sacred Dramas,' Falconer's 'Shipwreck,' Mason 'On Self-Knowledge,' 'Rasselas,' and Burke 'On the Sublime and Beautiful,' which were the chief ornaments of the bookcase, were all inscribed with her name, and had been bought with her pocket-money when she was in her teens. It must have been at least fifteen years since ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... firmly persuaded that, when all had been accomplished and endured, he was yet but an unprofitable servant, who had done that which was his duty to do. Some, perhaps, will consider such motives as oldfashioned, and such convictions as out of date; but self-abnegation, self-control, and self-knowledge that does not give to self the benefit of any doubt, are virtues which are not oldfashioned, and for which, as time goes on, the world is likely to have as much need as ever. [Sir James Stephen writes thus of his friend Macaulay: ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... 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, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... 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
... 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
... appear before the Judge of me and my persecutors. Be death but thought a transition from motion to rest. Few are the delights of this world for him who, like me, has learned to know it. Murmur not, despair not of Providence. Me, through storms, it has brought to haven; through many griefs to self-knowledge; and through prisons to philosophy. He only can tranquilly descend to annihilation who finds reason not to repent he has once existed. My rudder broke not amid the rocks and quicksands, but my bark was cast upon the strand of knowledge. Yet, even on these clear shores are impenetrable clouds. I have ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... 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 ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... convinces itself that 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 ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... 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 ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... confession of their faith in the virtue of the sex—all, the last drivellings of their egotism and impertinence. One might suppose that if anything could, the approach and contemplation of death might bring men to a sense of reason and self-knowledge. On the contrary, it seems only to deprive them of the little wit they had, and to make them even more the sport of their wilfulness and shortsightedness. Some men think that because they are going to be hanged, they are fully authorised to declare ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... 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 figures of people without their ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... 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 ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... philosophical 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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, neither takes thought for his own; each concentrates ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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
... 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 tolerably accurate views, and state them ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... 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 is unpleasant to her. Eleanor had no such self-knowledge. She thought in her own heart that 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 cradle on her return from the party. "After ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... 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 them ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... just read a notice of Thackeray, which asserts, as an evidence of his weakness in certain respects, that he imagined himself to be an artist, and persisted in supplying bad illustrations to his own works. This statement does injustice to his self-knowledge. He delighted in the use of the pencil, and often spoke to me of his illustrations being a pleasant relief to hand and brain, after the fatigue of writing. He had a very imperfect sense of color, and confessed that his forte lay in caricature. Some of his sketches were charmingly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... country like England glides through existence in perfect ignorance of their natures, so complicated and so controlling is the machinery of our social life! Few can break the bonds that tie them down, and struggle for self-knowledge; fewer, when the talisman is gained, can direct their illuminated energies to the ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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
... some come to see the Light, to find the Rock of Ages, is the simple path of honest self-knowledge, self-renunciation, self-restraint, in which every upward step towards right exposes some fresh depth of inward sinfulness, till the once proud man, crushed down by the sense of his own infinite meanness, becomes a little child once more, and casts himself simply ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... fountain was like an exquisite melody in his ears. It was good to be in such a place, to look on such a woman, to breathe such odours, and to hear such tuneful music. A dreamlike, half-mysterious satisfaction of the senses dulled the keen self-knowledge of body and soul for one short moment. In the stormy play of his troubled life there was a brief interlude of peace. He tasted the fruit of the lotus, his lips were moistened in the sweet ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 progress ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... 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, ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... that up to this moment neither does her self-knowledge qualify her to choose a life-companion, nor can her education be finished, nor is her experience sufficient for her to enter on the duties of a matron. But we do not appeal to these arguments. There are others ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... philosophy a firm and steady centre of action in the unchangeable nature of 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
... it waste of time to be always weighing herself and her feelings in a nicely-adjusted balance. 'Know thyself,' said an old thinker; but Audrey Ross would have altered the saying: 'Look out of yourself; self-forgetfulness is better than any amount of self-knowledge.' ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in her ear "Beni-Mora"; taking her to the map and pointing to the word 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
... 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, ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... power, when it is wisely assorted, assimilated and immediately employed; as is the water of a river, when it is used to produce electric power. The knowledge that leads to sovereign power, includes self-knowledge, self-respect and self-control. The man who does well whatsoever he undertakes, cannot be kept down, except by ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... is the irresolvable complexity of reality, of things and relations alike. Nothing is simple. Every wrong done has a certain justice in it, and every good deed has dregs of evil. As for us, young still, and still without self-knowledge, resounded a hundred discordant notes in the harsh angle of that shock. We were furiously angry with each other, tender with each other, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... falsehood? 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 ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... 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, modern ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... should move my dear companion to such depths of pity I was not able fully to understand until I learned that mind-reading is chiefly held desirable, not for the knowledge of others which it gives its possessors, but for the self-knowledge which is its reflex effect. Of all they see in the minds of others, that which concerns them most is the reflection of themselves, the photographs of their own characters. The most obvious consequence of the self-knowledge thus forced upon them is to render them alike incapable ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... influence of 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 ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... utterance of a calm self-knowledge. By what she had endured, the woman knew what she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... felt that 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
... balance of the faculties which is imposed upon civilized man by a conscious distinction of the possible from the impossible; he lacks the capacity for being contented with that state of life in which he is placed. Instead of the quiet courage and self-knowledge of a serviceable strength, he possesses the reckless and all-destroying zeal of the frenzied iconoclast; in place of patience under misfortune, in the hope of better times, he cultivates the insensibility begotten of ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... influence, and their good receives; By objects, which might force the soul to abate Her feeling, render'd more compassionate; 20 Is placable because occasions rise So often that demand such sacrifice; More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure, As tempted more; more able to endure, As more expos'd to suffering and distress; Thence, also, more alive to tenderness. Tis he whose law is reason; who depends Upon that law as on the best ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... he 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 have accused fate, circumstance, ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... stillness 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 burned the yellow dress at Mercerton, she would have arisen ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... in the air with unseen arm Hath turn'd my unchain'd fury against myself? Recoiling dragon! thy resistless force Scatters thy mortal master in his pride, To teach him, with self-knowledge, to fear thee. Forgetful of all corporal conditions, My ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... 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 ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... 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 ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... worlds, than the reasonable conclusion that our Architect must be quite able to construct millions of other buildings on millions of other plans, ought to rank with the writers just mentioned, in all but self-knowledge. Of every one of their systems I say, as the Irish Bishop said of Gulliver's book,—I don't believe half of it. Huyghens had been preceded by Fontenelle,[180] who attracted more attention. Huyghens is very fanciful and very positive; but he gives a true account of his method. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... 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 ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... is thus that man breaks through the boundary of his merely immediate and unconscious existence, so that, just because he knows himself to be animal, he ceases in virtue of such knowledge to be animal, and, through such self-knowledge only, can characterize himself ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Catholicism and Protestantism, differences between. Catholicism, Roman, its condition in England. Cato, the wisest Roman, a stoic by manners not by conviction. Censor, the office of, suggestion for its establishment in England. Charity, the outcome of self-knowledge. Charles I., Act of, concerning the bishops and the church lands, his trial, sermon on the martyrdom of, his ill-treatment by the Puritans ingratitude to him by the House of Commons history of the events which led to his death Charles the Second's Bounty Cheerfulness, a blessing of the poor ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... taken 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 that a ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... surface—the ultimate—rather than at the centre. This should be an education to children, teaching them that their temptations are to be dreaded only as they are responded to by something within, and that loses all power with them as they gain self-knowledge ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... 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 seen ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... you understand! Fool 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 ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... professed scientist on a scientific subject to which he had given no systematic study would be laughed at by his professional brethren, and would suffer from it even in his professional reputation, as it would be taken to indicate a dangerous want of self-knowledge. Perhaps, then, the training given in the divinity schools, though it does not touch special fields of science, is such as to prepare the mind for the work of induction by some course of intellectual gymnastics. Perhaps, though it does ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... but no longer terrible, no longer fallen—if not the god-head, yet the fine 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 ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... and the reflex 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 best of them, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Gomshott's in a state of profound but carefully concealed excitement, and only remembered the shell of the third egg when his landlady spoke of it that night. All day he could do no work because of this astonishing new self-knowledge, but this caused him no inconvenience, because he made up for it miraculously in his last ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... 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 oneself, to make oneself better, to suppress bad tendencies, ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... of a piece," 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... even amid the hard struggle of the strikes, he came to a self-knowledge. His perceptions were not easily confused; and by that intuitive process born pure in every soul, but too often marred and dulled by the many counterfeits put upon it, he knew this was love, a life-long passion for ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... 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
... 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; ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... blanket, hallowed by associations of past-life realizations. My divine guru approached and passed his hand over my head. I entered the NIRBIKALPA SAMADHI state, remaining unbrokenly in its bliss for seven days. Crossing the successive strata of self-knowledge, I penetrated the deathless realms of reality. All delusive limitations dropped away; my soul was fully established on the eternal altar of the Cosmic Spirit. On the eighth day I fell at my guru's feet and implored him to keep me always near him in ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... determine which of the two precedes, and which gives birth to the others. Our weakness, ignorance, and depravity remind us that in the Lord, and in none but Him only, dwell the two lights of wisdom, of virtue, and of piety. It is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until after he has contemplated the face of God, and come down after such ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... of the sterner, darker regrets—anything of that passion which I sometimes depict. They say that the personal and convincing element is totally absent because I have not lived"—he laughed—"and loved; that my work lacks the one thing which only the self-knowledge of great happiness and great pain can lend to it.... And—I think they are right, Valerie. What ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... he has something to say which is worth saying, which has to be said. Malling perceived that on this Sunday morning Mr. Harding possessed neither self-confidence nor conviction; though he made a determined, almost a violent, effort to pretend that he had both. He took as the theme of his discourse self-knowledge, and as his motto—so he called it—-the words, "Know thyself." This was surely a promising subject. He began to treat it with vigor. But very soon it became evident that he was ill at ease, as an actor becomes who cannot get into touch with his audience. ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to know what subjects are within the limits of your pencil; many have failed of success from the want of this self-knowledge. But pray tell me, what is the essential difference between Poetry and Prose? is it solely the melody or measure ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... unapparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is that the corresponding faculty in the ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... man very rich, with no ambition but to please her, no work to do which would thwart her. And here was another life offered, a life upon a higher, a more difficult plane; but a life much more worth living. That she saw clearly enough. But out of her self-knowledge sprang the ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... from 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 ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... constitution, and to the 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
... 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
... him free to complete his 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
... spiritual being they had ever 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 ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... civil servants, conscientious clergymen, schoolmasters, lawyers, and journalists, pushing agents, resourceful engineers, steady-going and often prosperous farmers, and strong, quick, intelligent labourers. Of the "self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control" needful to make a sound race they have an encouraging share. Of artistic, poetic, or scientific talent, of wit, originality, or inventiveness, there is yet but little sign. In writing they show facility often, distinction never; in speech ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... 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 ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... 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 been ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to form a sound judgment of another is bound to attain as great a measure as possible of accurate self-knowledge, not merely to understand the reaction of the foreign character when brought into relation with his own, but also to make allowance for fundamental differences of taste and temperament. The golden rule of judging others by ourselves can ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... rich 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, by ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... 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. to some use, to make the world better for it or stranger ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Self-knowledge, which from heaven itself (So sages tell us) came, What is it, but a daughter fair Of my ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... 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 refined, the more we shall find to like. Critics by ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... continued to fall upon the clasped hands; the worn face was distorted by mental suffering. The frozen soul of Mother Sub-Prioress having melted, the iron of self-knowledge was entering into it, causing the dull ache of a pain unspeakable. Yet she dared not sob, lest the heaving of her bosom should frighten away the little bird perched so lightly ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... play may be 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 head knowledge, ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... going through 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 hope is acting kindly ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... process 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 ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... 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 ostentatious sacrifices he made to pet ideas, he had no perception ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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
... career been wholly free from infringement upon the rights of your neighbor? If you send him to prison, you ought to link arms with him and go there, too. You have not been convicted by a court, but your own secret self-knowledge convicts you. When the prison doors close upon you, you will discover that you have suffered an injustice—that you are the victim of a blind stupidity. Not in this way can you be reformed. All genuine reformation must proceed from within ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... "'Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; These three alone lead life to sovereign power. Yet not for power, (power of herself Would come uncall'd for) but to live by law, 145 Acting the law we live by without fear; And, because right is right, to follow ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... this, 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 never suffer ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... consider intellectually beneath us, and 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 ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... childhood may be intimations of immortality; and the inspiration which poets of all ages have agreed to seek in the hope of endless renovation, he found in the immediate contemplation of present good. What his brother-poet called "self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control," are the keynotes of that portion of his poetry which deals with the problems of human existence. When he handles these themes, he speaks to the innermost consciousness of his hearers, telling us what we know about ourselves, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... 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 ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... Christ, 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 delusion ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... myself the question, "How is it that a man who not only boasts of a thorough knowledge of self, but also possesses it, has for some time almost blindly followed his instinctive impulses?" Of what use is self-knowledge if at the first commotion of the nerves it hides in a remote nook of the brain and remains there, a passive witness to impulsive acts? To investigate things post factum? I do not know of what ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... of other men's wits, are not excepted from the general condemnation 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
... 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 ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... upholdest the world. 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. Salutations to thee in thy form of vastness! Thou hadst assumed ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... 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 of his hearers, as so many preachers do, into the wind. He recalled them from orthodox ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... is necessary that he should learn to eliminate all the effects produced by his own nature upon the surrounding psycho-spiritual world. This can be done only by acquiring a knowledge of what we ourselves take with us into this new world. It is therefore primarily a question of self-knowledge, in order that we may become able to perceive clearly the surrounding psycho-spiritual world. It is true that certain facts of human development entail such self-knowledge as must naturally be acquired when one enters higher worlds. In the ordinary world of the physical ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... in general terms, I should run the risk of unduly expatiating on what is easily understood. Robert Fischer describes freemasonry as a society of men who have set themselves the severe task of a wise life and labor as the most difficult task, of self-knowledge, self-mastery and self-improvement,—tasks that are not finished in this life but only through death prepare us for the stage where the true consummation begins. These beautiful and straightforward words could just as ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... profit by 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 distress. No nation ever had, ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... sacrifice. The growth of the subjective speculation, as being capable of bringing the highest good, gradually resulted in the supersession of Vedic ritualism and the establishment of the claims of philosophic meditation and self-knowledge as the highest goal of life. Thus we find that the Ara@nyaka age was a period during which free thinking tried gradually to shake off the shackles of ritualism which had fettered it for a long time. It was thus that the Ara@nyakas could pave ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... "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, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 his ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... human heart, which, when perfectly placid and clear, reflects the very 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 the Greek and the Roman, ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... that by removing all the difficulties of our life we shall more quickly reach our aim, but on the contrary, my dear sir, it is only in the midst of worldly cares that we can attain our three chief aims: (1) Self-knowledge—for man can only know himself by comparison, (2) Self-perfecting, which can only be attained by conflict, and (3) The attainment of the chief virtue—love of death. Only the vicissitudes of life can show us its vanity ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... 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
... What evidence of the poet's direct knowledge of men? Of knowledge of man gained through acquaintance with Biblical, classical, foreign or English literature? Self-knowledge? ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... of aim and emotion like distracted masks in high carnival. He complains of the 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 ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... know more than 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 ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labor 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 but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Renaissance. Undue weight was given to literary training, while science and technical skill were despised. Our colleges and schools do not attempt to build character on a foundation of useful habits and tastes that sweeten life; to ennoble ideals, or inspire self-knowledge, self-reliance, and self-control. Technical education is still in its infancy; and the aesthetic instinct which lies dormant in every Aryan's brain is unawakened. A race which invented the loom now invents nothing but grievances. In 1901 Bengal possessed 69,000 schools and ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... that deeply interesting dialogue illustrates the difficulty of self-knowledge, which can only be acquired by the teaching ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 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
... an opinion should have so much weight with people, as their own experience might tell them that its acceptance is an entirely thoughtless and merely imitative process. But it tells them nothing of the kind, because they possess no self-knowledge whatever. It is only the elect Who Say with Plato: [Greek: tois pollois polla dokei] which means that the public has a good many bees in its bonnet, and that it would be a long business to ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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 ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... 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 ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... 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. ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... not been hooted from the boards. It had, on the contrary, been better received than many very estimable performances have been-than Johnson's "Irene," for example, or Goldsmith's "Good-natured Man." Had Crisp been wise, he would have thought himself happy in having purchased self-knowledge so cheap. He would have relinquished, without vain repinings, the hope of poetical distinction, and would have turned to the many sources of happiness which he still possessed. Had he been, on the other hand, an ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... Richey, 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 their chief ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... good specimen of the Sokratic manner. It brings out the 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
... prophetic 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 "to act strenuously in that direction ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... extraordinary will. He hurried off to Gomshott's in a state of profound but carefully concealed excitement, and only remembered the shell of the third egg when his landlady spoke of it that night. All day he could do no work because of this astonishingly new self-knowledge, but this caused him no inconvenience, because he made up for it miraculously in ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... library; but she felt 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 bending ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... of the half-animal but serviceable Understanding, tormented by Fancy and the unwilling slave of Imagination? and that there is something of self-consciousness in the breaking of Prospero's wand and burying his book,—a sort of sad prophecy, based on self-knowledge of the nature of that man who, after such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years, only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat and bandy quips with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... notion of progress, and consider man along with the other forms of life as subject to mere process. But anthropology, though in a way it is a branch of biology, has a right to a special point of view. For it employs special methods involving the use of a self-knowledge that in respect to the other forms of life is inevitably wanting. Anthropology, in short, like charity, begins at home. Because we know in ourselves the will to progress, we go on to seek for evidences of progress in the ...
— Progress and History • Various
... questions are put to him, tending to probe his self-knowledge, and in the end he is brought to the conclusion that perhaps he had better hold his tongue, for it seems he knows nothing at all. And so he went away deeply despondent, despising himself as an absolute dolt. "Now many," adds Xenophon, "when brought into this condition by Socrates, never ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... meaning 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 fugitive, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 conditions ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton |
