Quotes About Self-discovery

If I'm O.K., I will abandon restrictions and curbs imposed on myself. Not physical ones, but those restrictive tabs on my inner being, on solely myself. I will strip me of superficial dishonesties. I will paint against every rule I or others have invisibly placed.

I have tried the fancy, superficial life in my past, but I quickly learned that diamonds are not my best friend.

The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.

But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.

Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.

In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?

No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write, find out wether it spreading out its root in the deepest places of your heart...Delve into yourself for a deep answer

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are.

We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.

Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.

I want to unfold. I don't want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

And I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song.

Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous.

And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.

Confess to yourself in the deepest hour of the night whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?

For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?

I would describe myself like a landscape I've studied at length, in detail; like a word I'm coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother's face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.

Think... of the world which you carry within yourself... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.