Quotes About Self-discovery

Now--she reached down that far, she submerged her filthy self, full of choked cries, of loneliness and poison, until she felt it rising up. It was being pulled out, saved from herself--and she was rising along with it, slowly: who she was now, what she had lost in the past year, and what was growing, slowly, inside her, in spite of everything.

The book should betray me, in the sense that it should take me to places I am afraid to go

The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing...is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

And there will be a time, not for long, a month is enough, or a week, when every single person will be able to completely fulfill what they were meant to be—everything their bodies and souls have offered them, not what other people have dumped on them.

Can't help the way I'm made. Don't want to help it, either. It's gotten me this far. As

Rosen, D. (1996) Transforming Depression: Healing the Soul Through Creativity. New York: Penguin/Arkana.

The true self] rests in direct intuition. Therefore I said: "Better to abandon disputation and seek the true light."60

was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an "I." But at this moment I came upon myself.Previously I had existed, too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist. Previously, I had been willed to do this and that; now I willed.20

These talks with the "Other" [No. 2 personality] were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy.

On this path, we are making a bet that underneath all of that, you are big and powerful and good. All of that power, that wisdom, and that excellence is your true nature. All you have to do is carve away and drop the bullshit.

Gen. Matthew Ridgeway "intended not to impose his will on his men, but to allow the men under him to find something in themselves that would make them more confident, more purposeful fighting men. It was their confidence in themselves that would make them fight well, he believed, not so much their belief in him. His job was to keep them to find that quality in themselves.

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

If you aren't free of yourself how will you ever become yourself?

You have inner emotional turmoil because you are suppressing who you really are and submitting, through fear, to another's design; and/or you are seething with anger and resentment with people who won't live their lives as you believe they should.

As we "press forward to what lies ahead," the transformation we desire already "lies within us.

Deep inside of us we all know there is someone we were meant to be.

Of course! That was it! I didn't need a tattoo. What I needed was something a lot less expensive and considerably less painful. What I needed was a Playboy. Guys who are gay do not keep Playboy magazines in their bedrooms.

Cleanse the mirror of your heart, and you will see God.

Find the goddess inside yourself instead of looking for the god in someone else.

He made you you - on purpose. You are the only you - ever. Becoming ourselves means we are actively cooperating with God's intention for our lives, not fighting him or ourselves.

You take your problems to a god, but what you really need is for the god to take you to the inside of you.

Our perfection certainly consists in knowing God and ourselves.

One question you never want to ask God is, 'What's wrong with me - because He'll tell you.