Quotes About Self-discovery

What is education? I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.

Until you know who you are you can't write.

Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

our lives teach us who we are

The self was both its origins and its journey.

Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.

He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn't become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn't know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be. He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began.

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad? No, that wasn't it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had it in you to be.

Quichotte when young had been a little short, a little chubby compared to other boys his age. Then, in late adolescence, as if an invisible divine hand had grabbed him and squeezed him in the middle like a tube of toothpaste, he shot up to his present height and became as skinny as a shadow.

So, now that Quichotte was in full possession of his senses, there were things he needed to say. 'My quest for you', he told Miss Salma R, 'has not been for you alone, but also for my own compromised goodness and virtue. I see it now. By attaining you - the impossible! - I thought it might validate my life. By becoming worthy of you I might feel worthy of being myself'.

When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise unto the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain. It's the Western Way of Enlightenment. You begin to cram your fists into your mouth to stifle the screams. You bleed on the inside.

Her thoughts, loosen by solitude, often burst these days through her unconscious lips; and often contradict one another (...)

We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

She had turned away from her sexuality, her instincts having warned her that to do otherwise might be to be absorbed by it; that it was for her, would always be, a big subject, a whole dark continent to map, and she wasn't prepared to go that way, be that explorer, chart those shores: not any more, or, maybe, not yet.

When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left.

other people (the rocks on which we break ourselves and founder), and on the other, of the darkness circling within ourselves (which sucks us down, and we drown).

But if they don't try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in their adult lives, I will wonder whether they had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience.

Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.

I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else—not speaking, reading, or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe the contents of consciousness—one has experiences that are generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar practice.

You must allow your players to become the athletes they can be. Don't make them into anything just to become the kind of winners fans, friends and others think they must be.

No one feels strong when she examines her own weakness. But in facing weakness, you learn how much there is in you, and you find real strength.