knowing yourself Quotes

“People think they know what they want but they generally don’t. Sometimes if they’re lucky they’ll get it anyways. Me I was always lucky. My whole life. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“When the critical moment in a close race was upon you, you had to know something he did not - that down in your core you still had something in reserve, something you had not yet shown, something that once revealed would make him doubt himself, make him falter just when it counted the most. Like so much in life, crew was partly about confidence, partly about knowing your own heart.”

“I know myself . . . but that is all.”

“How can you get very far, If you don’t know who you are?”

“somebody/ anybody sing a black girl’s song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms carin/ struggle/ hard times sing her song of life she’s been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty she’s half-notes scattered without rhythm/ no tune sing her sighs sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel let her be born let her be born & handled warmly.”

“They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.”

“The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man.”

“I do assure you, Sir, that I have no pretension whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere.

“Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different purport.”