Honore de Balzac Quotes

How easy it is to see your brother's faults, How hard it is to face your own. You winnow his in the wind like chaff, But yours you hide, Like a cheat covering up an unlucky throw. Dwelling on your brother's faults Multiplies your own. You are far from the end of your journey. The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart. See how you love.

One of the goals of a spiritual practice is self-awareness, and one of the best tools of self-awareness is simple emotional vulnerability.

It's good to explore your darkness.

Gail Sheehy tells us that "the delights of self-discovery are always available." All Fools' Day is the perfect day to engrave this wisdom in our hearts.

It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.

I wasn't really testing it on myself as much as I was learning from other people about what it meant to live and love with your whole heart, and then thinking, oh my god, I'm not doing that.

Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection

The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. Others only delude themselves and thus upset families, churches, and all other relationships. In their self-pride and judgment of others, they show great inconsistency.

It is apparently vital that we should be in the dark about ourselves not to be clear about our intentions, fears, and hopes. There is a stubborn effort in us to set up a compact screen between consciousness and the self.

Intelligent people know others. Enlightened people know themselves.

Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all of that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things. We are all in this together.

Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world.

With each new character, I find something new about myself that I didn't know before.

There is but one man who can believe himself free from envy; and it is he who has never examined his own heart.

He who knows much about others may be learned, but he who understands himself is more intelligent. He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.

When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools.

Self-reflection is the school of wisdom.

Be yourself. Be true to that, to your heart. Patience. See what happens if you step back instead of bounding forward.

You don't throw your life away Going Inside You get to know who's watching you And besides you resides in your body

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world. Yet from this lesson thou will learn to avoid the frog's foolish ambition of swelling to rival the bigness of the ox.

Life is a constant challenge to know oneself.

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

Whoever can weep over himself for one hour is greater than the one who is able to teach the whole world; whoever recognizes the depth of his own frailty is greater than the one who sees visions of angels.