George Santayana Quotes

I have known men who could see through the motivations of others with the skill of a clairvoyant; only to prove blind to their own mistakes. I have been one of those men.

To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.

You know more about me than I do about myself, that's probably true.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Self-awareness is something that we actually actively avoid.

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

Don't be fooled by your own wisdom

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

In other living creatures the ignorance of themselves is nature, but in men it is a vice.

Every one is least known to himself, and it is very difficult for a man to know himself.

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

He that knows himself, knows others; and he that is ignorant of himself, could not write a very profound lecture on other men's heads.

People seem to know more about me than I do.

There's only one person who knows me - and that's me.

Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

I once read that people who study others are wise but those who study themselves are enlightened.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

This precept descended from Heaven: know thyself.

A man may call to mind the face of his friend, but not his own. Here, then, is an initial difficulty in the way of applying the maxim, Know Thyself.

He who knows himself knows others.

Man is a wonder to himself; he can neither govern nor know himself.

I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

Understanding like the eye; whilst it makes us see and perceive all things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own subject.