Gao Xingjian Quotes

All knowledge, is ultimately, self knowledge.

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

I write to discover what I think.

In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.

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

If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affect you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then show your copy to whom you please.

When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.

Self-awareness involves deep personal honesty. It comes from asking and answering hard questions.

Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.

Oh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves.

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

After all, all knowledge simply means self-knowledge.

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.

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.

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears?

Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives.

There's another style of meditation that I've been doing since my mid-twenties. Tapping into your higher self to get a glimpse of yourself from the outside and get insight into what's going on in your life. I learned that from my godfather in my mid-twenties.

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.

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words. ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning. ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful.

The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.

This is...self-knowled ge-for a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

Every decision you make ... is a decision about Who You Are.