Echoes

We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.

Parents love their children as themselves; for their issue are by virtue of their separate existence a sort of other selves.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

To be a good mother — a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands. Meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers; wanting their children to love them best, and take their part, in secret, against the father, who is held up as a scarecrow.

To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

When you are content to be simply yourself, everybody will respect you.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather to what he does not say.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

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

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

It is no use to preach to [children] if you do not act decently yourself.

I was not aware that a father who is a glutton and a drunkard can beget moderate and virtuous children. Nor did I know, though I know it now, that the food which cannot be digested kills, while that which is digested sustains life.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.