Jean de La Fontaine Quotes

Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself.

For all my education, accomplishments, and so called 'wisdom'... I can't fathom my own heart.

I know everything except myself.

Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.

I feel eager to learn as much as I can, not only about my craft but the world and the cosmos and how we got here and whether there's any purpose to our being here.

There is not anything that can so suddenly flood the mind with shame as the conviction of ignorance, yet we are all ignorant of nearly everything there is to be known.

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

He knows the universe and does not know himself.

You cannot experience yourself as what you are until you've encountered what you are not

People don't know anything about themselves because they're all worried about everybody else.

I woke up today knowing everything about everything.

How little do the wisest among us know of that which is so important to us all.

I speak of that learning which wakes us acquainted with the boundless extent of nature, and the universe, and which even while we remain in this world, discovers to us both heaven, earth, and sea.

Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

The tools which would teach men their own use would be beyond price.

Our true and genuine wisdom can be summed up as the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves.

To know is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.

This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

One of the main goals of self-education is to eradicate that vanity in us without which we would never have been educated.

One of the good things about getting older is you find you're more interesting than most of the people you meet.