Quotes About Self-discovery

One becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.

This is true freedom: to be capable of leaving ourselves, crossing the boundaries of our little world to open up the universe.

How hard it is to become a man again when one has ceased to be a man." -The Lost Steps

He could not change the man he had been, but these hands would make him the man he could be

In the final chapter of Profiles in Courage, Kennedy concludes: "The stories of past courage can define that ingredient—they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.

Failure, it will happen. Disappointment, it will happen. It's part of your life and you can't let it go without confronting it. Confront failure because this is how you find yourself. This is where you understand who you are.

Still, as I watch the sun journey higher up on the horizon, I appreciate that, for only the second time in my entire life, I am alone, blessedly alone, with no one to tell me what to do or what to wear, no one to have to be polite to. Nothing. But I do not wish to be alone, not entirely. Now that I am finally alone, it feels...lonely.

It's intriguing. I've always felt like a freak myself. But what would it be like, to wear my freakishness on the outside, to have it be obvious to the world?

I got myself there. No one does anything for me. So I know when I meet the right guy, it's not going to be someone like my dad. It's not going to be someone who needs me. It's going to be someone who can, for once in my life, be a hero. I'm hoping guys like that still exist.

The only place where you can regain lost paradises is in yourself

Every human being is a Leonardo da Vinci. The only problem is that he doesn't know it. His parents didn't know it, and they didn't treat him like a Leonardo. Therefore he didn't become like a Leonardo. That's my basic theory.47

Being initiated is not like receiving a diploma that you hang on your wall. It only happens when a real goal is achieved in the physical and the spiritual simultaneously—on earth as it is in Heaven. Because of that, a new form of consciousness and spiritual knowledge sprouts from the greatest depth of our existence and stays indefinitely in our being. It is a light that sprouts from the source of the superior self that will guide us until the end of the search.

I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed — some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.

What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy, character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?

51. What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy, character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?

There was a question I wanted answered more than I wanted anything else, and it could take my life to answer it. This question was What could I be? This was what I wanted to know.

I needed to teach writing students to hold on—to themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future. And to the country. And to do so with what they write. We won't know when the world will end. If it ever does, we will be better served when it does by having done the work we can do.

Alone with myself and my talent, I chose it in some way I never had before. I chose myself also. The person I was and had been all along, the one who had not belonged to the place where she was born, nor to the places she found along the way, the one always under the mask, here she came out and breathed the air and felt at home. I had always believed that to be this person might destroy me or the world, and so as the world seemed to end, this made the end of the world seem nearly a paradise.

I still didn't know I had written it to do this, but then I did. I wish I could show you the roomful of people who've told me the novel is the story of their lives. Each of them as different as could be. I still don't know if I'd be in that room.

I became something they couldn't imagine, something they would have kept me from becoming, and that, it seems to me, was always in my nature to become. They

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all palisades, all fences, within which she is held captive!

It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.

Bioenergetics is an adventure in self-discovery. It differs from similar explorations into the nature of the self by attempting to understand the human personality in terms of the human body. Most previous explorations focused their investigations on the mind.

And we need to know what it is to be human, if we are to avoid becoming narcissists.