Quotes & Sayings About Understanding Oneself

Imagine how many suicide victims would still be with us, if only the right person said the right thing at the right time. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

After all, everyone may not start with the same financial opportunities; however everyone does start with the choice to live their life with integrity, trust, love, respect,understanding for each other and oneself. — Tasha Hoggatt

If you are not actively seeking the truth, you are destined to only know what people tell you, and people will only tell you what they want you to know. — Jack Mierop

Still there are people who grasp freedom at once, who don't doubt, don't hesitate - but accept themselves as the measure of themselves and of everything, and who don't seem to show any dread. In some cases there are people who have the strength to do it and the innate wisdom to understand what the price is. In other cases they are people who have no idea what they're doing, who choose freedom out of ignorance and lack of understanding - they know nothing about any price, and they go under when the price is demanded. It means ruin to choose to think for oneself if one can't think. — Jens Bjorneboe

Understanding breeds empathy. — Christopher Paolini

The second element of true love is compassion. Compassion is the capacity to understand the suffering in oneself and in the other person. If you understand your own suffering, you can help him to understand his suffering. Understanding suffering brings compassion and relief. You can transform your own suffering and help transform the suffering of the other person with the practice of mindfulness and looking deeply. — Thich Nhat Hanh

There are endless ways to amuse oneself and be idle, and most of them lie outside the woods. I assume that when a man goes to the woods he goes because he needs to. I think he is drawn to the wilderness much as he is drawn to a woman: it is, in its way, his opposite. It is as far as possible unlike his home or his work or anything he will ever manufacture. For that reason he can take from it a solace-an understanding of himself, of what he needs and what he can do without-such as he can find nowhere else. — Wendell Berry

though aging reduces speed, it increases experience and understanding — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual. — Gautama Buddha

Our pasts often set our circumstances. — Katherine Russell

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand. — Mary McCarthy

Understanding of oneself is the first act in establishing a transformative philosophy for living a vivid and a reflective existence. Knowing thy self is essential to designing and instigating a meaningful life that is self-directed instead of exclusively controlled by innate traits and external determinates. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Life is not about reward and punishment," said Xuen. "It is about understanding, accepting who oneself is right now, in order to know what to change, and how. — Christie Golden

Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself. — John Berger

Then he asked me which one I thought was most likely to happen. I wish I knew. I really do. But I don't. You'd think that after living with these people for fifteen years I'd know a little something about them. But right now I feel like I don't know my parents at all. I guess
when you get down to it, I've never really thought about them as people. They've always been my parents. Now I have to think about them as people with feelings. What a pain.
The funny thing is, I bet they feel the same way. — Michael Thomas Ford

Nurture the child within oneself and define a new era of global peace and understanding.'-Dalia Qutob — Fida Fayez Qutob & Dalia Qutob

Compassion is the capacity to understand the suffering in oneself and in the other person. If you understand your own suffering, you can help him to understand his suffering. Understanding suffering brings compassion and relief. — Thich Nhat Hanh

A common understanding is the pivot and a common way to bond the disintegrated — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Questioning authority doesn't make you resistant; who should follow blindly without knowing the destination — LDarnell

When we know what we most fear, we know what we most care about. — Patti Digh

Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings. — Richard Eyre

If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual, — Carl R. Rogers

if people do not understand you outrightly, do not worry; understand people outrightly and act with wisdom, courage and understanding — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Offenses offend, beware! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

One of the fundamentals of understanding love is that love comes from within oneself rather than from someone else. — Gabriel Cousens M.D.

Christian love comes from the understanding that there is a unity of divine origins in oneself and in other people, and not only in people, but in all living things. — Leo Tolstoy

Through the mind and judgment,
it is not possible to understand
oneself and others.
True understanding is
a compassionate heart. — Human Angels

A person imbued with compassion and self-understanding can readily love oneself and exhibit endless sympathy for all people. A person who is unkind to their self can never transcend their corrupt barriers much less run into the world with open arms enthusiastically embracing humankind and all of nature with uninhibited friendliness and goodwill. — Kilroy J. Oldster

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. — Theodore Roethke

The major dilemma is that we tend to listen to reply, while all we should do is: listen to understand and feel. — Akilnathan Logeswaran

Stop wasting so much energy hating your body; it makes you weaker. Everything good in your life begins from the moment you begin accepting, understanding, respecting, and loving your true self. — Harry Papas

Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation. — Seamus Heaney

All attributes of the relative self (prakrut) in the world have arisen due to lack of understanding. All this has arisen due to not understanding the truth. One has been wandering around for countless lives and still one considers oneself so great! — Dada Bhagwan

To stand alone is to be uncorrupted, innocent, free of all tradition, of dogma, of opinion, of what another says, and so on. Such a mind does not seek because there is nothing to seek; being free, such a mind is completely still without a want, without movement.
But this state is not to be achieved; it isn't a thing that you buy through discipline; it doesn't come into being by giving up sex, or practicing a certain yoga.
It comes into being only when there is understanding of the ways of the self, the 'me', which shows itself through the conscious mind in everyday activity, and also in the unconscious. What matters is to understand for oneself, not through the direction of others, the total content of consciousness, which is conditioned, which is the result of society, of religion, of various impacts, impressions, memories - to understand all that conditioning and be free of it. But there is no "how" to be free. If you ask how to be free, you are not listening. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Speransky, either because he appreciated Prince Andrey's abilities or because he thought it as well to secure his adherence, showed off his calm, impartial sagacity before Prince Andrey, and flattered him with that delicate flattery that goes hand in hand with conceit, and consists in a tacit assumption that one's companion and oneself are the only people capable of understanding all the folly of the rest of the world and the sagacity and profundity of their own ideas. — Leo Tolstoy

By seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense forgets his own name, dares not believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, along with the crowd.
Now this form of despair goes practically unnoticed in the world. Precisely by losing oneself in this way, such a person gains all that is required for a flawless performance in everyday life, yes, for making a great success out of life. Here there is no dragging of the feet, no difficulty with his self and its infinitizing, he is ground smooth as a pebble, as exchangeable as a coin of the realm. Far from anyone thinking him to be in despair, he is just what a human being ought to be. Naturally, the world has generally no understanding of what is truly horrifying. — Soren Kierkegaard

Life has two choices: create or destruct. These choices are the backbone for all, within oneself and outside oneself. Too many ways of thinking are described by too many people that have no idea. If you're attached to your ways then detach, so you can change. Use this detachment in your writing, relationships, and understanding of life. Our future as individuals, as nations, and as mankind can only go one way. It's our choice whether we want the painful path or the peaceful path. — Mark Donnelly

Words entangle. But if one can understand the whole significance of the ways of one's thought, the ways of our desires and their pursuits and ambitions, then there is a possibility of having or understanding that which is love. But that requires an extraordinary understanding of oneself.

[...]

Love is not a sentiment, not romanticism, not dependent on something, and that state is extremely arduous and difficult to understand, or to be in - because our minds are always interfering, limiting, encroaching upon its functioning. Therefore it is important to understand first the mind and its ways; otherwise we shall be caught in illusions, caught in words and sensations that have very little significance. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Today, girls are pressured to dress and behave in an overtly sexual way, despite the conventional understanding that a "slut" is a woman who does just that. In this milieu, calling oneself a "slut" doesn't allow you to wrest the term away from those who would use it to judge and control women. Rather, it just confirms negative stereotypes of what it means to be female. You're merely adding ammunition to the arsenal. — Leora Tanenbaum

But to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right. — Iris Murdoch

A lot of people travel because they are unhappy, but travelling does not necessary makes one happier. Sometimes it exacerbates the unhappiness, the loneliness. — Vann Chow

As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

He used to annoy me with sophistry that we all chose our destiny. Then one day I told him that that's great when fate offers you a nice set of destinies to choose from, but when you find yourself choosing between risking being raped, tortured and killed, or moving to another country to live like an alien without tongue, money or understanding, you are buggered either way. And that's not even to mention how easily he could navigate through the mine filed of his mistakes... — Dunya Look

So the obvious, then: the liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people's lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own. I will indulge a resounding tautology: every great civilization, including ours, has had a great literature and great readers. If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble. — David Denby

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears. — Erich Fromm

To make images is a way of ordering one's world, of exploring and understanding one's relationship to existence ... The images we make are often ahead of our understanding, but to say "yes" to a subject is also to have recognized, however dimly, a part of oneself; to live with that image, to accept its significance is perhaps to grow in understanding. — John Blakemore

And then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at once - the couch, the walls, even the floor - and I know Bennies alone in Lou's studio, pouring music down around us. A minute ago it was "Don't Let Me Down". Then it was Blondie's "Heart of Glass". Now it's Iggy Pop's "The Passenger". Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you. — Jennifer Egan

Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul's journey. Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one's own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us. As — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To me, 'The End of the Jews' - both the title and the novel itself - is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world. — Adam Mansbach

Through my own observations. I am convinced that an absolutely honest and direct inquiry into oneself will lead to understanding. — Bruce Lee

We're merely one tree with various types, shapes and sizes of leaves that all wave differently in the breeze — Rasheed Ogunlaru

When the world kicks your ass, don't step in line.
book: stuff i think about — Sondra Faye

Once you tell somebody a story, you are all in the same world and you can all speak to each other about the same things and understand the same things. — Bilal Tanweer

But in the meantime, you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary."
"What is that, grandmother?"
"To understand other people. — George MacDonald

We are all inclined to ... direct our inquiry not by the matter itself, but by the views of our opponents; and, even when interrogating oneself, one pushes the inquiry only to the point at which one can no longer offer any opposition. Hence a good inquirer will be one who is ready in bringing forward the objections proper to the genus, and that he will be when he has gained an understanding of the differences. — Aristotle.

Stay calm and exercise restrain during your most desperate moment or you shall desperately say what when your desperation is over, you shall come to a later realization of what you shouldn't have say and notice how silence could have been the best option to mere words! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

To gain an overall understanding of oneself does not require looking outward - it requires the strength of looking inward. — Michelle Cruz-Rosado

Just because I understand does not mean I agree. — Carlos Wallace

Understanding others is knowledge, Understanding oneself is enlightenment; Conquering others is power, Conquering oneself is strength. — Laozi

Of course, I am interested, but I would not dare to talk about them. In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other. — Richard Feynman

So many people have understanding, but in reality, they don't really understand understanding! When you really understand understanding, you get a real understanding! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms "success" and "failure" had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one's place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things. — Paul Auster

If we would know true love and understanding one for another, we must realize that communication is more than a sharing of words. It is the wise sharing of emotions, feelings, and concerns. It is the sharing of oneself totally. — Marvin J. Ashton

If you desire to know or learn anything to your advantage, then take delight in being unknown and unregarded.
A true understanding and humble estimate of oneself is the highest and most valuable of all lessons. To take no account of oneself, but always to think well and highly of others is the highest wisdom and perfection. — Thomas A Kempis

Belief is just the place of understanding you are at the moment. Without an open mind, you will be standing in that one spot forever. — Dannye Williamsen

A favor is a friendly, gracious, kind, generous or obliging act that is freely granted. It is offered and not solicited.
A promise is a declaration assuring that one will or will not do something. It is a vow to commit oneself by a promise to do or give. It is a pledge: to make a declaration assuring that something will or will not be done.
When you assume and mistook favor for a promise, then misunderstanding comes in.
Learn to distinguish clearly between a favor and a promise to avoid false expectations, blind hopes and deep disappointments.
Never demand on favours given.
Never impose on mistaken promises.
Never put under pressure the people who have given you favor.
Have a humble and grateful heart for both favors and promises fulfilled. — Angelica Hopes

First one must understand conditioning - only then can we speak of choice — Rasheed Ogunlaru

Choose food, clothing, and shelter that accords with nature.Rely on your own body for transportation. Allow your work and your recreation to be one and the same. Do exercise that develops your whole being and not just your body. Listen to music that bridges the three spheres of your being. Choose leaders for their virtue rather than their wealth or power. Serve others and cultivate yourself simultaneously. Understand that true growth comes from meeting and solving problems of life in a way that is harmonizing to yourself and to others. If you can follow these simple old ways, you will be continually renewed. — Lao-Tzu

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? — Barbara Ehrenreich

There is nothing personal in the thunderclap of understanding. The lightning that releases it comes from outside oneself. — Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

What is the point of relaying every word when the words become the crime of friendship. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

If God gives you comfort, extend a comforting hand unto others. If God saves you, extend a saving hand unto others — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Ruskin's interest in beauty and in its possession led him to five central conclusions. First, beauty was the result of a number of complex factors that affected the mind both psychologically and visually. Second, humans had an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Third, there were many lower expressions of this desire for possession (including, as we have seen, buying souvenirs and carpets, carving one's name on a pillar and taking photographs). Fourth, there was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it. And last, the most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding was by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so. — Alain De Botton

The underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us ... — Barack Obama

A lower power cannot compass the full understanding of a higher. But to limit one's belief to the bounds of one's own small powers, would be to tie oneself down to the foot of a tree, and deny the existence of its upper branches. — Mrs. Alfred Gatty

Under presupposition of free will each human action would be an inexplicable miracle - an effect without cause. And if one dares the attempt to make such a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae imaginable to oneself, one will soon become aware that here the understanding quite genuinely comes to a standstill: it has no form for thinking of such a thing. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The only certain way to forge new understanding it to carry out investigations for oneself. — Jane Borodale

When we understand who we are, and how our realities work, we can choose more consciously to shape our lives in an optimal way.
Knowledge of oneself is the very key to a happy life. Happiness is not something outside of our own consciousness that needs to be earned, and achieved. It is a choice that needs to be supported by positive actions. It is not enough to say that we want to be happy. Our desire of happiness, love and peace, needs to be supported by our state of being. — Raphael Zernoff

Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, — Salman Rushdie

Her friend who treated her maid badly was not a wicked person. She behaved well towards her family ... but when it came to her maid ... she seemed to have little concern for her feelings. It occurred to Mma Ramotswe that such behaviour was no more than ignorance; an inability to understand the hopes and aspirations of others. Theat understanding ... was the beginning of all morality. If you knew how a person was feeling, if you could imagine yourself in her position, then surely it would be impossible to inflict further pain. Inflicting pain in such circumstances would be like hurting oneself. — Alexander McCall Smith

If the key to life is figuring yourself out; family must be the lock. — LDarnell

32And the scribe said to him, "You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that w he is one, and a there is no other besides him. 33And to love him with all the heart and with all b the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, c is much more than all d whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." 34And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God. — Anonymous

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions - and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas - can't be yours alone. [ ... ] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares. — Doris Lessing

The moment when you realize no one understands, no one ever did, no one ever will.
You were alone, you always will be.
But may be, just may be, someone will look up to you someday. And when they do, remember to hide those tearful eyes, to smile and to say - look, life's so good. — Sanhita Baruah

Ignorance is an illusion; we seek understanding. Compassion paves the way towards understanding and understanding paves the way towards acceptance. — Alaric Hutchinson

True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten oneself and others. — Voltaire

As you have seen the treachery of love because of me, I have seen my cruelty because of you. But you learned mercy from me, and from you I learned resilience. As you came to understand me enough to know the value I placed on selfless love, I understand your nature better. — D. Morgenstern

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither. — Henry James

When you choose to look down on something, you render yourself incapable of understanding it. — Stewart Stafford

When we say we understand something, but we do not experience it, we do not understand it.

Understanding and experiencing are the same thing.

For example, we may say: I understand the importance of forgiveness BUT I can't do it.

Firstly, replace "I can't do it" with:
I am choosing to remain in the state of being of ignorance (misinformation), because I believe it to be the best option I can choose from.

Secondly, replace "I understand the importance of forgiveness" with:
"I do not understand the importance of forgiveness".

Being honest with oneself is the first step to self-understanding. — Raphael Zernoff

Thus knowing oneself is no less, and may be more, of a requirement than understanding the enemy. — Martin Van Creveld

Beauty is seen in repetition; keep repeating your beauty even if your beauty is not all that beautiful, you shall still leave a mark and there shall come a moment when the beauty will be seen — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

In Asian languages, the word for 'mind' and the word for 'heart' are same. So if you're not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you're not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

A person must know who he is. A person must understand himself, improve himself, learn his weaknesses in order to overcome them. It is hard for a person to understand his own weaknesses. — Chaim Potok

To be understood is to prostitute oneself — Fernando Pessoa

If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him. — Criss Jami

When we want to talk, we can instead listen, and let our attentiveness to another's need to speak be our silent statement. — Bryant McGill

We must resist in-group thinking and practice seeing every soul as a brother or sister in a larger grouping of humans on earth. — Bryant McGill

Lack of understanding of the true nature of happiness, it seems to me, is the principal reason why people inflict sufferings on others. They think either that the other's pain may somehow be a cause of happiness for themselves or that their own happiness is more important, regardless of what pain it may cause. But this is shortsighted. No one truly benefits from causing harm to another sentient being ... In the long run causing others misery and infringing their rights to peace and happiness result in anxiety, fear, and suspicion within oneself. — Dalai Lama

I understood myself only after I destroyed myself. And only in the process of fixing myself, did I know who I really was. — Sade Andria Zabala