Saint Michael Garicoïts wrote...
Question: What is the most necessary piece of knowledge for human life?
Reply: It is self-knowledge. It is better to know one’s faults than to enter into all the secrets of states and empires than be able to unravel all the demands of nature. Question: What is the scarcest of all knowledge? Reply: It is self-knowledge. We can see far beyond ourselves and yet we miss what is nearest, namely ourselves. Everybody knows our short comings, we are the only ones not to know them.
Question: What is preventing us from knowing ourselves? Reply: We see ourselves from too close an angle. Our eyesight gets mixed up with the object and we are not sufficiently detached from ourselves to be able to have a good view of ourselves. This leads to great disorder; we don’t want to know ourselves. (M 412)
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