“In judging myself I shall try to be as harsh as truth, as I want others also to be.”
Introduction
1920s, An Autobiography (1927)
Context: In judging myself I shall try to be as harsh as truth, as I want others also to be. Measuring myself by that standard I must exclaim with Surdas: ' Where is there a wretch So wicked and loathsome as I? I have forsaken my Maker, So faithless have I been.' For it is an unbroken torture to me that I am still so far from him, who, as I fully know, governs every breath of my life, and whose offspring I am. I know that it is the evil passions within that keep me so far from Him, and yet I cannot get away from them.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Mahatma Gandhi 238
pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-rul… 1869–1948Related quotes
“I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.”

Responding to the opposition of Communist Party of India (Marxist) towards the India–United States Civil Nuclear Agreement, as quoted in "‘Anguished’ PM to Left: If you want to withdraw, so be it" http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070811/asp/frontpage/story_8179523.asp, The Telegraph (India) (11 August 2007)
2006-2010

As quoted in Sophia, Living and Loving: Her Own Story (1979) by A. E. Hotchner, p. 76.
Context: I was blessed with a sense of my own destiny. I have never sold myself short. I have never judged myself by other people’s standards. I have always expected a great deal of myself, and if I fail, I fail myself. So failure or reversal does not bring out resentment in me because I cannot blame others for any misfortune that befalls me.

Note to George P. Putnam, on the date of their wedding (7 February 1931), as quoted in The Sound of Wings (1989) by Mary S. Lovell

“I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.”
Journal entry (14 October 1922), published in The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927)
Context: By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love — the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun, all that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.

Variant translation: Let the trumpet of the day of judgment sound when it will, I shall appear with this book in my hand before the Sovereign Judge, and cry with a loud voice, This is my work, there were my thoughts, and thus was I. I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good.
Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), Book I
Context: Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous and sublime; even as thou hast read my inmost soul: Power eternal! assemble round thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and, if he dare, aver, I was better than that man.

“I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Void and Compensation (1947), p. 200