Quotes About Self-discovery

Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will only see what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise. . . . So we must stumble and fall, I'm sorry to say.

Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously. Your False Self is just who you think you are—but thinking doesn't make it so.

To have a spiritual life is to recognize early on that there is always a similarity and coherence between the seer and the seen, the seekers and what they are capable of finding. You will seek only what you have partially already discovered and seen within yourself as desirable. Spiritual cognition is invariably re-cognition.

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves.

As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our "survival dance," but we never get to our actual "sacred dance.

Allow yourself to be fully known, and you will know what you need to know.

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves. The very fact that so many religious people have to so vigorously prove and defend their salvation theories makes one seriously doubt whether they have experienced divine mirroring at any great depth.

You do not climb up to your True Self. You fall into it, so don't avoid all falling

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting.

Am I willing to walk into the wilds of my interior life without knowing what I'll find?

It takes a huge push, much self-doubt, and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what Mom and Dad always wanted them to be and do.

It takes therapists years to achieve the same result and reestablish appropriate boundaries from wounding parents and early authority figures, and to heal the inappropriate shame in those who have been wounded. We all must leave home to find the real and larger home

We do not want to embark on a further journey if it feels like going down, especially after we have put so much sound and fury into going up. This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?

Encontramos a Dios en nosotros mismos, y nos encontramos a nosotros mismos en Dios.

Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously.

Self-worth is not created; it is discovered.

In this high place it is as simple as this, Leave everything you know behind. Step toward the cold surface, say the old prayer of rough love and open both arms. Those who come with empty hands will stare into the lake astonished, there, in the cold light reflecting pure snow, the true shape of your own face. David Whyte, "Tilicho Lake"   Conservatives

We need to encounter the hero within and let him lead us on the adventure of our lives.

People who know who they are find it the easiest to know who they aren't.

The self-same moment that we find God in ourselves, we also find ourselves inside God

We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line. We are created with an inner restlessness and call that urges us on to the risks and promises of a second half to our life. There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.

Asking for something from God does not mean talking God into it; it means an awakening of the gift within ourselves.

If you don't walk into the seond half of your own life, it is you who does not want it.

There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong "container" or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The first task we take for granted as the very purpose of life, which does not mean we do it well. The second task, I am told, is more encountered than sought; few arrive at it with much preplanning, purpose, or passion.