Quotes About Self-discovery

I had surprised myself this year by jumping in to reshape my life before life stepped in to reshape it for me.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names.

Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.

I began to think that my body was the most special thing in the world. Better than other bodies, even. Not because of the way it looked, but because of all the things it could do. All the different buttons there were to push. I wanted to find out what every single one of them was. I wanted to feel as good as possible.

I definitely wanted freedom, but I wasn't yet ready to step into it, embody it, breathe it, own it.

That though passageway came with a surprising revelation. When life forces you to face yourself, what awaits in the mirror is a gift: vulnerability. Your heart is pierced. You're broken open. You're hyper-aware of what you're feeling.

It's hard to pinpoint the precise moment when we internalize others' assessments; it's usually not just a single experience but rather a series of moments that bruise the spirit and lead us to distrust ourselves and those around us. And then we wake up at age seventeen or twenty-five or thirty-seven and realize we don't know the last time we've lived life only to please ourselves

On this part of my journey, I'm at last quieting the noise of our world—removing all the external distractions and opinions and judgments and tuning in to my own voice. I'm recognizing my own power and owning it. I'm finally trusting myself, believing I already have inside me the answers I most crave. And above all, I'm discovering who I am at my core—and becoming, day by day, more myself.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, day and night, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight Ã¢â'¬Â¦ It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, day and night, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight Ã¢â'¬Â¦ It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. —e. e. cummings, poet and playwright

But once you finally take sail in your life, you no longer crave a captain.

I've spent so many years withholding parts of myself, sacrificing my spirit to make others feel comfortable. But now, I'm done with pretending, with living in a prison of my own creation. I'm done with dimming my light.

I'm a person in process, from the me I once was to the me I am now.

Who are we really? What are all the various pieces that form us? Which parts of ourselves do we embrace or dismiss, and what does that mean or not mean? Most of us are comfortable with expressing certain aspects of ourselves, while other sides might get left in the shade by default. For me, the latter was apparently happening on an unconscious level.

I want to know who I am and accept every part of that identity. I am frightened and I am fearless. I am weak and a warrior. I am uncertain and I am confident. And by learning to embrace the paradox in all of it, I am more myself.

Yes I was burned but I called it a lesson learned. Mistake overturned so I call it a lesson learned. My soul has returned so I call it a lesson learned...another lesson learned

The path to self-discovery is not a straight line. It's a zigzag. We move in and out of awareness: one step forward, three steps to the left, a baby step back, another leap forward. A lightbulb moment might shine brightly one day, but then flicker the next. It takes work to hold tightly to a certain consciousness, to live in its wisdom. Every day, I have to intentionally maintain an awareness of my value.

When life forces you to face yourself, what awaits in the mirror is a gift: vulnerability. Your heart is pierced. You're broken open. You're hyperaware of what you're feeling.

Bliss is a beautiful destination, but you can often only reach its shores after a turning point. It's as if the universe is testing you to be sure you are strong enough to make it through the murky waters, not just the serene ones, so that you can move to a new and unknown place in yourself.

It has been about realizing that in order for the truth to set me free, I must first be brave enough to birth it.

We adjust ourselves to fit, to adapt to others' ideas of who we should be. We shift ourselves not in sweeping pivots, but in movements so tiny that they are hardly perceptible, even in our view. Years can pass before we finally discover that, after handing over our power piece by small piece, we no longer even look like ourselves.

Now the real beginnings of the 'freedom' which we have discussed for many years--and a heady freedom it is, coming after so many years of reaching outward for it--to finally discover all I had to do was reach inward, and it was there waiting all the time for me