#knowledge

in times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#knowledge #remaining-silent #wisdom #men

Presque tous les malheurs de la vie viennent des fausses idées que nous avons sur ce qui nous arrive. Connaître à fond les hommes, juger sainement des événements, est donc un grand pas vers le bonheur." ("Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.") [Journal entry, 10 December 1801] ↗

— Stendhal

#reality #reality-check #self-knowledge #self-perception #unhappiness

If Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times and not in thee thyself; then art thou lost eternally. ↗

— Angelus Silesius

#religion #self-knowledge #art

One had to live a long time to know a man's true nature. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#man #nature #personality #love

When a man has a gift in speaking the truth, brute aggression is no longer his security blanket for approval. He, on the contrary, spends most of his energy trying to tone it down because his very nature is already offensive enough. ↗

— Criss Jami

#approval #authority #blanket #brute-force #brutes

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#else #everyone #heart #i #knowledge

You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it. ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#knowledge #orgone #pride #projection #self-knowledge

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs. ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#nature #nature

I think it's good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone. ↗

— Amy Sedaris

#being-alone #self-knowledge #time

The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing. ↗

— Voltaire

#self-knowledge #wisdom #wisdom