self awareness on Foolishness

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.

To be curious about that which is not one's concern while still in ignorance of oneself is ridiculous.

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...

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it...

We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

'He hath ever but slenderly known himself."

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

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 ...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? The Books of the Psalms and David The Book of Psalms is divided into five books, like the five books of the Torah. While it is not obvi...

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

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

Recently at church I asked our congregation, “How many of you battle with self-deception?” A few people in the crowd raised their hands. Then I asked, “How many of you know someone who is very self-de...

The great mistake made by most of the Lord’s people is in hoping to discover in themselves that which is to be found in Christ alone.

One of the dangers of living in a constant state of distraction is that we never go to the bottom of our pain, our sadness, our emptiness, which means we never find that rock-bottom place of the peace...

We spend the whole of our whole lives watching ourselves. But when a man becomes meek he has finished/

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...

In his poem Cocktail Party , T. S. Eliot captures a fundamental truth about human nature and the source of much hurt in the world. People’s actions are rarely driven by outright malice—intended t...

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Holy God, we realize that You know us more intimately than we know ourselves. We come before You now asking You to show us our sin, to make us aware of our failings, to open our eyes to our brokenness...

To believe that you have already reached perfect sanctification, R. C. Sproul says you must do one of two things: 1. “reduce the demands of God’s law to such a low level that they can obey them” or 2....

Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.

To know oneself, is above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against the Truth, and not the other way around.

A belligerent samurai . . . once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout—I can’t waste my time with the likes of ...

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...

Over the years, I’ve read about many leaders who failed ethically in their leadership. Can you guess what they had in common? They all thought it could never happen to them. There was a false sense of...

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Self-judgment may be the greatest barrier to self-understanding.

Know Thyself-but don’t tell anyone.

The unexamined life is not worth living.