Whoever knows himself knows his Lord
Though this saying is not found in the authenticated hadith collections, Ibn Arabi and the wider Sufi tradition relied on it to justify treating honest self-examination as a direct method for knowing God, not merely as ethical housekeeping.
This saying circulates throughout Sufi literature as a hadith, but hadith critics have long pointed out that it does not appear with a sound chain of transmission in any of the canonical collections, and some scholars suspect it may echo older Hellenistic or Christian gnomic sayings about self-knowledge rather than originate with the Prophet. Regardless of its exact origin, Ibn Arabi and the broader Sufi tradition treat it as functionally authoritative because it captures something central to their metaphysics: since the human being is, per the doctrine of al-insan al-kamil, the most complete mirror of the divine names, an honest inward look at one's own self becomes one of the most direct routes to knowing God rather than a distraction from seeking Him. The saying licenses a whole method: self-examination, watching one's own states and motives, as itself a form of theological inquiry.
Whoever knows himself knows his Lord.
Hadith scholars widely regard this saying as lacking a sound chain of transmission in the canonical collections, despite its centrality to Sufi self-inquiry.