Quotes About Self-discovery

There is a good and needed "narcissism," if you want to call it that. You have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it.

Anne Wilson Schaef

One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them.

Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.

Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own...Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do...

At 53, she was through with the foolishness of men's genitals. In fact, it had been many years since she had cared what hairy things dangled between their pale, scrawny legs. She now considered the fact that she had ever cared a kind of temporary lunacy and was thankful that her madness had been short lived, not terribly virulent and ultimately cured by marriage as God intended.

the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own. Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do...Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.

Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.

I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read.

Man starts thinking this late in life, no previous experience or proper guidance

The more he thought about it, life's truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understandings of how things worked, what they were. Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood? Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world?

I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read. Around

We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we're faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we'll do, but who we'll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging shut behind us each time we select this one

Ahead the long rails were glinting in the moonlight, stretching away, away to somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man.

he lay down in the middle of the field in the sun on his back and closed his eyes, and felt wind, sun, the ground below him...The sun confused him, with its warmth, the brightness. He dozed throughout the rest of the afternoon. His life meant something. he was his own man, belonged to no one.

It takes time to see anyone's real damage.

You must forge your own path for it to mean anything.

Our desires reveal us. They show us for who we really are.

Like the zodiac sign?' Percy asked. 'I'm a Leo.' 'No, stupid,' Leo said, 'I'm a Leo. You're a Percy.

My name is Carter Kane. I'm fourteen and my home is a suitcase.

It's been my observation I said, "that you humans are more than the sum of your history. You can choose how much of your ancestry to embrace. You can overcome the expectations of your family and your society. What you cannot do, and should never do, is try to be someone other than yourself–Piper McLean.

I'll admit that I was staring. Suddenly my whole perspective had flipped inside out, like when you look at an inkblot picture and see just the black part. Then your brain inverts the image and you realize the white part makes an entirely different picture, even though nothing has changed. That was Alex Fierro, except in pink and green. A second ago, he had been very obviously a boy to me. Now she was very obviously a girl.

You're sure?' I asked. 'I mean, the Lord of the Sword is great. But you could also be, I don't know, the Slammer of the Hammer'.

You sure you're not a Roman, Annabeth? Or an Amazon?