James McBride Quotes

The more that we self-analyze ourselves, the nicer we are to people and to ourselves, and the more we understand each other.

To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.

I was a self-centered bore. I was masochistic, and only thought I was happy. When I woke up and said, "there must be something wrong with me", I grew up. Because I never understood myself, how could I hope to understand anyone else? That's why I can truly say that now I can give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her.

Relationship is a mirror in which you can see yourself, not as you would wish to be, but as you are.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.

The true cure for self-righteousness is self-knowledge.

Read not books alone, but men, and amongst them chiefly thyself.

Always search for your innermost nature in those you are with, as rose oil imbibes from roses.

It's really about connecting to your own humanity and your own behaviors, and getting to a level of self-awareness so that you can have perspective and step outside of yourself and transform and become another person.

I observe myself and I come to know others.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

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.

It's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

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

In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.

And he who does not know himself does not know others, so it may be said with equal truth, that he who does not know others knows himself but very imperfectly.

Intelligent people know others. Enlightened people know themselves.

He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

Nothing will make us so charitable and tender to the faults of others, as, by self-examination, thoroughly to know our own.

Most of your suffering comes from the lack of understanding of yourself and others.