What does this quote mean?

“The farther that one goes out (from himself), the less he knows.”

The paradox warns that outward accumulation can become a distraction from direct understanding; more movement is not automatically the same as deeper knowledge.

Source note: Tao Teh King, chapter 47, James Legge translation; the sentence belongs to a passage about knowing without compulsive outward searching.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

The line gives mental interpretation enormous power, while its speaker and dramatic context also caution against treating self-deception as wisdom.

Source note: Book I; spoken by Satan, so context matters.

“Who can (make) the muddy water (clear)? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear.”

The muddy-water image makes stillness a condition for clarity: agitation can keep disturbance suspended, while enough quiet allows what is clouding perception to settle without force.

Source note: Tao Teh King, Chapter 15, James Legge translation, Project Gutenberg #216. The next sentence asks how the condition of rest is secured and answers through the gradual relation between movement and rest; the passage belongs to Taoist philosophy, not a clinical relaxation technique.

“Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know.”

Certainty can be strongest where understanding is weakest, so confidence by itself is poor evidence that a belief has been examined well.

Source note: Essays of Montaigne, Book I, Charles Cotton translation, in a skeptical discussion of confident claims.

“Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.”

In the work’s poetic frame, inward knowledge exists before it is fully verbalized; the line values listening closely to one’s own interior understanding without claiming that intuition is automatically infallible.

Source note: The Prophet, section “Self-Knowledge.” A man asks Almustafa to speak about self-knowledge, and Almustafa answers with this line before describing the heart’s knowledge and the self as a boundless sea. The represented wording is the 1923 text preserved by Wikisource/Project Gutenberg #58585.

“As you succeed in overcoming self you will begin to see things in their right relations.”

For Allen, clearer perception follows disciplined work on one’s own impulses and biases; self-mastery changes not only conduct but the proportions in which problems are seen.

Source note: The Way of Peace; Allen links self-mastery with clearer perception and a less distorted relationship to circumstances and other people.