Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.

How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

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

If you don't know yourself, you don't know your nature. If you don't know your nature, you don't know where to exist. By knowing your nature, knowing yourself, you know what to be and how to live. And that only comes from knowledge of self, knowing yourself.

It is not enough to understand what we ought to be, unless we know what we are; and we do not understand what we are, unless we know what we ought to be.

When alone I am not aware of my race or my sex, both in need of social contexts for definition.

One does not get to know that one exists until one rediscovers oneself in others.

I know that I exist; the question is, What is this 'I' that 'I' know.

Truly know thyself, and to thine own self be true.

Technology has outstripped our knowledge of self.

I think this is what college is all about: self-examination and dealing with those questions of "Who am I?"

I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself'as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.

Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us to know one another.

The self cannot be found in books. You have to find it for yourself, within yourself.

It's important to be self-aware about what people are saying about you, but even more so, be very aware of who you actually are, and to have that be the main priority.

I know myself," he cried, "but that is all-

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

It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being.

No man knows himself as an original.

Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

Self-knowledge involves relationship. To know oneself is to study one self in action with another person. Relationship is a process of self evaluation and self revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.

Everybody has to know where they're coming from, what they're doing, why they're doing it, who they are. These are essentials.