Quotes About Self-discovery

Harriet was silent, thinking, and then she said, It is too hard to be a person. You don't only have to go on and on. You have to be-- she looked for the word she needed and could not find it. Then, You have to be tall as well, said Harriet.

Not really a demon; not really human. I'm not either. That's all. There was no place for me, so I had to find one myself. And then I realized. I had a place, but I was the only one in it. I didn't know any other way to live.- InuYasha

Since my adolescence I have read two and sometimes three newspapers a day, frequently clipping an article that for obscure and soon forgotten reasons attracts me. I usually toss the clippings into a desk drawer, and later, often years later, I'll find myself reading through the clippings, throwing most of them out. It fills me with a strange sadness, a kind of grief for my lost self, as if I were reading and throwing out old diaries.

How was I to be a scientist, father Lion?' Science is knowing. What could I have known? Others always did the knowing, knew what was in me, what should come out of me, what was best for me. I didn't know who I was, what I wanted. I know less now, and I am afraid.

Does every young woman, she wondered, discover herself through the eyes of the men who love her?

I felt it wouldn't kill me to learn something before I died

Emma Goldman wrote an autobiography called Living My Life that Jiko is always trying to get me to read, but I haven't gotten around to it yet because I'm too busy living my life or trying to figure out how not to.

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

I'm just an actor, and no more interesting than you are. She scribbled her name. Probably not as interesting, actually You should pay more attention to yourself and less to people like me. You'll be better off that way.

I'd never really

My play over, watching the sun go down, I'd frown and blow on the wound, and then I felt a sense of peace, as if I and the gray evening landscape were confiding in each other. Just the opposite from heroin or melting together in a woman's juices, the pain made me stand out from my surroundings, the pain made me feel as if I were shining. And I thought this shining self could get along well with the lovely orange light of the setting sun.

talking with him made me realize I wasn't the only one. "I mean, it's like everybody's acting out a part," he'd tell me. "They say stuff they don't really think, or do stuff they don't really feel like doing, and after a while you find yourself acting the same way.

Find something that, when you're doing it, makes you feel like you don't have anywhere to go. If you don't find it, you'll end up having to go somewhere you don't want to.

Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?

The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.

Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.

even the richest personality is nothing before he has chosen himself, and on the other hand even what one might call the poorest personality is everything when he has chosen himself; for the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and this everyone can be if he wills it.

To be human, is not a fact, but a task.

The tedium vitae so constant in antiquity was due to the fact that the outstanding individual was what others could not be ; the inspiration of modern times will be that any man who finds himself, religiously speaking, has only achieved what every one can achieve .

When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity.

Qué es entonces la cultura? Yo siempre la he considerado como el camino que ha de recorrer un individuo para llegar al conocimiento de sí mismo; y muy poco le servirá a quien no quiera emprender ese itinerario el haber nacido en la más ilustrada de las épocas.

To be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself…the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.

To strive against the whole world is a comfort, to strive with oneself is dreadful.

Oh, to what degree human beings would become—human and lovable beings—if they would become single individuals before God!