it's always good to know that you have been the best even though deep inside you know you will never be better than that.

Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self assertive humble. ...truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two.

How well do we actually know ourselves? Can we dare to say that we really know someone, like really, really know them?

How to recognize what is real? To know the layers and depths of oneself, to know how to open, to know how to fill a capacious hold-all, to know one’s own quirks and nervous twitches, cravings and transparencies, and, above all the force, literally the force, of events, connections, the wild calm in every thing.

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.

“One who knows himself genuinely only loves others' heart with least care to different minds.”