W. H. Auden Quotes

You can answer your own question. You already know the answer, if you can just gain access to it.

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.

What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.

Tell me who I am. (29)

Sometimes you didn't really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had.

We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.

Somewhere inside we do know everything about ourselves. There is no real forgetting. Perhaps we know somewhere, too, about all there is to come.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding — a thing which is rather surmised and never spoken than known and clothed in words.

Show me one man who knows his own heart, to him I shall belong.

Failing to understand the workings of one's own mind is bound to lead to unhappiness.

He who recites dramatic works makes discoveries about his own character.

The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is.

You mine your own past in order to get to know yourself.

Few of us are granted the grace to know ourselves, and until we do, maybe the best we can do is be consistent.

After all, without understanding yourself, what basis have you for right thinking?

All women want to be understood until they understand themselves.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

Everybody should have a documentary made about themselves. It's amazing what you see and what you learn.

She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself.

It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God's face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.

Lord, teach me to know you, and to know myself.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.