Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

To know yourself you have only to set down a true statement of those that ever loved or hated you.

If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.

The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.

When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.

What you really have to know is one: yourself. And the only way you can know that one is in the mirror of the others. And the only way you can see into the mirror of the others is by love or its opposite—by profound emotion. Certainly not by curiosity—by dancing around asking, looking, making notes. You have to live relationships to know.

Each character represented a trait that resides in me.

I love books, and all the best ones are people analysing their own emotions. You can learn from that.

Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling.

A lot of what I've been learning in the last two years is due to therapy - about my sexuality, why things go wrong, why relationships haven't worked. It isn't anything to do with anybody else; it's to do with me.

I don't think we spend enough time in reflection and introspection. We don't know who we are as individuals in this culture anymore.

Know thyself.

I want people to find their inner depth.

I think the better you know yourself as a person, the better an actor you can be.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

All knowledge, is ultimately, self knowledge.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.

They say: 'If a man knew himself, he would know all mankind.' I say: 'If a man loved mankind, he would know something of himself.

It is wisdom to know others. It is enlightenment to know oneself.

I believe in the importance of seeking self-knowledge. The more I know myself, the more I feel empowered.

Filled with her love, may I be rather grown Mad with much heart, than idiot with none.

He who knows others is clever; He who knows himself has discernment.

I'm such an incredibly, stupidly sensitive person that everything that happens to me, I experience it really intensely. I feel everything very deeply. And when you feel things deeply and you think about things a lot and you think about how you feel, you learn a lot about yourself. And when you know yourself, you know life.

Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

You can never be more outside of you, than what's in you