Quotes About Self-discovery

Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.

Loneliness isn't an absence of company. Loneliness is felt when we are lost. But we can be lost right in the middle of a crowd. There is nothing lonelier than being with people who aren't on your wavelength. The cure for loneliness isn't more people. The cure for loneliness is understanding who we are.

You are right to think of these lives like a piano where you're playing tunes that aren't really you. You are forgetting who you are. In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one. You are forgetting your root life. You are forgetting what worked for you and what didn't. You are forgetting your regrets.

What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.

She had a fire insider her. She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her. The she realised. A fire has no motive. Only she could have that. The power was hers.

We are always bigger than the pain we feel. Always. The pain is not total. When you say "I am in pain," there is the pain and there is the I but the I is always bigger than the pain. Because the I is there even without the pain, while the pain is only there as a product of that I. And that I will survive and go on to feel other things.

Personally, for me, I am happy that I largely mended myself without the aid of medication, and feel that having to experience the pain minus any "anesthetic" meant I got to know my pain very well, and become alert to the subtle upward or downward shifts in my mind.

She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.

Don't do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It's always best to live it as yourself.

The one truth she had, a truth she was now proud of and pleased with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbles hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person tense. A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing. Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse. I AM ALIVE.

If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it.

She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before. She heard Mrs Elm's voice, from under the table somewhere far behind her, cutting through the noise. 'Don't give up! Don't you dare give up, Nora Seed!' She didn't want to die. And she didn't want to live any other life than the one that was hers.

She realised, in that moment, that she was capable of a lot more than she had known.

But amid pure nature (or the 'tonic of wildness' as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.

The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.

WE ARE ESSENTIALLY alone.

FIRE Every part of her That changed That got scraped off Because of schoolyard laughter Or the advice of grown-ups Long gone – And the pain of friends Already dead. She collected those bits off the floor. Like wood shavings. And she made them into fuel. Into fire. And burned. Bright enough to see for ever.

I was convinced I wasn't made for the reality of the world. And in a way, I was right. I wasn't made for the world. I was, like everyone, made by the world. I was made by parents and culture and TV and books and politics and school and maybe even shopping centres. So, I either needed a new me. Or a new planet. And I didn't yet know how to find either. Which is why I felt suicidal.

The best thing about rock bottom is the rock part. You discover the solid bit of you. The bit that can't be broken down further. The thing that you might sentimentally call a soul. At our lowest we find the solid ground of our foundation. And we can build ourselves anew.

If, as Schopenhauer said, "we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people," then love—at its best—is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.

A Camus quote came to her, right in the middle of it. I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.

The trouble is our lives are cluttered. The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.

Existe la idea de que uno lee para escapar o para encontrarse a sí mismo. En realidad, yo no veo la diferencia. Nos encontramos a nosotros mismos a través del proceso de escapar. No se trata de dónde estamos, sino de adónde queremos ir.