Quotes About Self-discovery

Then there are the scores of notebooks, their contents calling — confession, revelation, endless variations of the same paragraph — and piles of napkins scrawled with incomprehensible rants. Dried-out ink bottles, encrusted nibs, cartridges for pens long gone, mechanical pencils emptied of lead. Writer's debris.

I'm certain, as we filed down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve-year-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

He figured out what he wanted to see by seeing himself." (About Robert Mapplethorpe)

I was my own lucky hand of solitaire.

Good education means learning to read, write and most importantly learn how to learn so that you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.

We will not ever know ourselves again. Like the light that moves between the bars of light we sometimes called death, we , too, will have flowered, even with such unquenchable flames as these.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not.

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he has no intention of ever leaving it again.

The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear.

In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn't have been possible for him to remember where he had begun.

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

The past, to repeat the words of Proust, is hidden in some material object. To wander about in the world, then, is also to wander about in ourselves.

My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.

ta strogi intelektualni trening ga je postopoma spremenil v druga?nega ?loveka. Nau?il se je kako naj od dale? gleda nase, a se vidi najprej kot ?lovek med drugimi ljudmi, potem kot zbirko naklju?nih delcov in nazadnje kot prašno zrnce- in bolj ko se je oddaljeval od tam kjer je za?el,... bližje je prihajal temu, da postane velik.

Rather than fill me with ecstasy or gladness, this breakthrough overpowered me with dread. I didn't know myself anymore. I was inhabited by something that wasn't me, and that thing was so terrible, so alien in its newness, I couldn't bring myself to talk about it. I let the tears come pouring out of me, and once I started, I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to stop

We find ourselves only by looking to what we're not. You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

One, mentioned in a 2017 Economist article, felt "sharper, more aware of what [the] body needs" on 1P-LSD,

Which one is grammatically correct? I never know.

you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? And how may I become myself?

ANOTHER MOTIVATION FOR activities such as mountain climbing is curiosity about one's own capacities.

Whoever wants the "I" to yield up its mysterious and tremendous secret must stop it from looking perpetually in the mirror, must stop the little ego's fascination with its own image.

A half-hour, stolen from the day's activities or the night's rest, set apart for meditation in his own house, will in the end yield a good result.