Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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

To search for truth about self is as valuable as to search for truth in other areas of life.

The better you understand yourself the less cause you will find to love yourself.

The knowledge of self is the most important thing, because how are you going to know God if you don't know yourself? How are you going to know anything if you don't know yourself?

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

Self-knowledge is the great power by which we comprehend and control our lives

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

Even with limited intelligence, knowing oneself is not as difficult as some say, but to act according to what one has realized about oneself in real life is as difficult as practicing anything else, compared to theory.

Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God.

I think over time you learn to know a bit more about yourself - you develop a certain amount of self-insight and self-awareness, and you know what you can absorb, and what you cannot; what gets to you and what doesn't.

This precept descended from Heaven: know thyself.

If I do not understand myself, the whole complexity of myself, I have no basis for thinking.

How can we learn self-knowledge? Never by taking thought but rather by action. Try to do your duty and you'll soon discover what you're like.

By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

After all, all knowledge simply means self-knowledge.

Learn to know yourself... to search realistically and regularly the processes of your own mind and feelings.

Wouldn't have no knowledge of wealth, without no knowledge of self.

Never lose sight of this important truth, that no one can be truly great until he has gained a knowledge of himself, a knowledge which can only be acquired by occasional retirement.

One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.

The real preparation for education is the study of one's self.

Knowing yourself has to always come from within. The outside can inspire or guide you, but knowing has to come from within you.

To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning; the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject.

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.

People have to learn who they are - you can't have somebody else telling you who you are.