Leo Tolstoy Quotes

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.

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.

But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.

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

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

I can explain my body and my brain, but there's something more. I can't explain my own existence - what makes me a unique human being.

Do not know yourself. I want to continue to surprise me.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

Who are we? The answer to this question is not only one of the tasks but the task of science.

Know thyself.

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge.

We have to have a very clear understanding of ourselves.

Tell me who I am. (29)

All your life you compare and contrast, explore and search. But knowing yourself well is, well, elusive.

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

a lesson must be lived in order to be learned and the clarity to see and stop this now that is what i've earned

Without ego I don't know how identity works, I don't know... I need to sit down and re-read some philosophy or something.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

Not to know me argues yourselves unknown.

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

I like when people know exactly, have a good sense of themselves, and know exactly what's good for them, I admire that, but I don't have anywhere near that kind of perspective on my own.

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.'

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.