There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

Charles J. Shields

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead life to sovereign power.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.

Alice Walker

The soul, who is lifted by a very great and yearning desire for the honor of God and the salvation of souls, begins by exercising herself, for a certain space of time, in the ordinary virtues, remaining in the cell of self-knowledge, in order to know better the goodness of God towards her.

Catherine of Siena

There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

Charles J. Shields

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

Cynthia Ozick

I think self-knowledge is the rarest trait in a human being.

Elizabeth Edwards

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

F. H. Bradley

The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.

F. H. Bradley

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Franz Kafka

I actually think there's an incredible amount of self-knowledge that comes with getting older.

Jamie Lee Curtis

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

Jane Smiley

Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Destiny has always been something that interested me as a subject, but not in a fatalistic way because I believe that one can transform destiny through self-knowledge.

Laura Esquivel

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.

Marilyn Ferguson

Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

Marilyn French

The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's.

Mason Cooley

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.

Meg Rosoff

My failures may be my greatest successes. It is in failure that I have often drawn closer to God, learn to depend more on Him than myself, gained self-knowledge, and seen things in their right perspective.

Mother Angelica

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

Nate Silver