All men desire by nature to know."

Aristotle

"It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.''

Ball, Lucille

"Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth."

Borne, Ludwig (1786-1837)

Paradigms are difficult to perceive. They are also so deeply internalized that many of their components remain out of awareness. This situation can be put to use in discovering them: argumentation and ferment within disciplines often occurs, so to speak, at the "fault line" between paradigms. Yet, because a paradigm so deeply creates "reality," people feel challenged by its discussion and often experience surprise, disbelief, resistance, or defensiveness.

Claire Monod Cassidy, article; Unraveling the Ball of string: Reality, Paradigms, and the study of alternative medicine. in Advances, vol 10, #1, 1994

The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.

William Channing

Animals awaken first facially, then bodily. Men's bodies wake up before their faces do. The animal sleeps within its body; man sleeps with his body in his mind.

Chazal

Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself as something wholy different from the profane ...the history of religions...is constituted by a great number of ..manifestations of sacred realities. ...in each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act-- the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

He knows the universe and doesn't know himself.

La Fontaine, Fables, VIII., 26 Democrite et les Abderitains

He who would cure his ignorance must confess it.

Montaigne, Michel De, Essais, III

A mark of the spiritually advanced is their awareness of their own laziness.

M. Scott Peck, TRLT

"The life which is unexamined is not worth living."

Plato, APOLOGY OF SOCRATES

 

 

"Men must be taught as if you taught them not,

And things unknown proposed as things forgot."

Pope, Essay on Criticism, pt.iii, 1, 15

Pleasures of achievement demand difficulties such that beforehand success seems doubtful although in the end it is usually achieved. This is perhaps the chief reason why a modest estimate of one's own powers is a source of happiness. The man who underestimates himself is perpetually being surprised by success, whereas the man who overestimates himself is just as often surprised by failure. The former kind of surprise is pleasant, the latter unpleasant.

Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

"Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps a few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of."

Swift

"The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself."

THALES

Consciousness of our powers augments them.

Vauvenargues

"Who has deceived thee so oft as thyself?"

Franklin, Benjamin, POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC

"There is really no enjoyment other than in being aware of our powers and using them, and the greatest pain is to become aware of their lack when they are needed."

Schopenhauer

"Oh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves"

Shakespeare, William, Coriolanus