proverbs on Self-Knowledge

Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom: Enlighten by your Holy Spirit those who teach and those who learn, that, rejoicing in the knowledge of your truth, they may worship you and serve you from gen...

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams observes that the biblical ideal is not so much that we need to deny the self as to decenter the self: To see the self in truth, as an integral member of a comm...

Peter Drucker suggests that we should always sustain two streams of learning and self-improvement. And though he is speaking specifically about work and career, what he says is equally applicable whet...

To confess, then, is to praise and glorify God; it is an exercise in self-knowledge and true humility in the atmosphere of grace and reconciliation.

There is not any thing, relating to men and characters, more surprising and unaccountable, than this partiality to themselves. . . . Hence it is that many men seem perfect strangers to their own chara...

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Seco...

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

All: Knowing God, we often believe our way is the best way. In our arrogance, we ignore your will and your ways. We confess our dependence on knowledge and our independence from you. Thank you that yo...

All-knowing God, we often believe our way is the best way. In our arrogance, we ignore your will and your ways. We confess our dependence on knowledge and our independence from you. Thank you that you...

If I am in denial about my own weaknesses and sin, there will be a concomitant blindness to the greatness and glory of God.

I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas. Especially strong thinking powers (...

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...

The search for knowledge can go wrong, not as a result of individual, erroneous judgments or of mistakes creeping in at different points, but because of one single mistake at the beginning… Faith does...

All: Gracious God, you promise that your light drowns out darkness, yet the darkness is so persistent. We cannot see in front of us, so we look to our own knowledge and ways. Forgive us for turning to...

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. T...

Impostors draw their identity not only from achievements but from interpersonal relationships. They want to stand well with people of prominence because that enhances a person’s résumé and sense of se...

Truth consists in the mind giving to things the importance they have in reality.

’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

To believe one does not need counsel is great pride.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

In this short poem, the psychologist Daniel Goleman (the developer of the concept of Emotional Intelligence (E.Q.)) builds on the work of R. D. Laing’s “knots.” The poem is a helpful reminder that our...

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. Af...

I actually want to believe that when it comes to communication, my biggest problem is outside of me, not inside of me. I want to think that it’s my kids, my wife, my neighbors, my boss. I want to thin...

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

Love to be unknown.

He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of sel...

Becoming a teachable person has two prerequisites: There must be a teacher and a person willing to be taught. Increasingly, Western culture has become an environment that celebrates and platforms the ...

The ancient Greek word for actor was hypocritēs (ὑποκρῐτής), which, at first, only implied someone who explained or interpreted something. But by New Testament times, it was more negative. It suggest...

Stop being so sure that you are always right, and others wrong. Don't trust your own opinion, when you find it contrary to that of older men, and especially to that of your own parents. Age gives ...