Quotes About Self-discovery

Es ist wie eine mathematische Gleichung, aber niemand lernt sie in der Schule auswendig; sie wird nicht deutlich auf die Tafel geschrieben. Es ist Algebra für Mädchen, aber niemand bringt sie dir bei. Du wirst zu Fall gebracht oder niedergeworfen, und du lernst selber. Keine Mutter der Welt kann es ertragen, es dir zu erklären.

I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you're by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone – as it seems to me – is in danger.

Where is the real Less? Less the young man terrified of love? The dead-serious Less of twenty-five years ago? Well, he has not packed him at all. After all these years, Less doesn't even know where he's stored.

Here, all this time, Less thought he was merely a bad writer. A bad lover, a bad friend, a bad son. Apparently the condition is worse; he is bad at being himself.

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

And finally: Who are we when we're not ourselves?

Why this endless need for a man as a mirror? To see the Arthur Less reflected there? He is grieving, for sure—the loss of his lover, his career, his novel, his youth—so why not cover the mirrors, rend the fabric over his heart, and just let himself mourn? Perhaps he should try alone.

Have you met someone?" "Me? I think maybe I'll go it on my own. Maybe I'm better that way. Maybe I was always better that way and it was just that when I was young, I was so scared, and now I'm not scared.

By his forties, all he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab.

Slowly, the impossible dawned on him, and with terror he was forced to look deep within himself, as we all someday must, and ask: Am I the only frigid homosexual in New York? It turned out he was. So he left. So: Bad gay?

We have no heart at seventeen. We think we do; we think we have been cursed with a holy, bloated thing that twitches at the name we adore, but it is not a heart because though it will forfeit anything in the world-the mind, the body, the future, even the last lonely hour it has-it will not sacrifice itself.

Andrew Sean Greer

Why this endless need for a man as a mirror? To see the Arthur Less reflected there?

He chose a Lessian costume- jeans and a cowboy shirt, only slightly wrong- and made his way south along the hillside, toward the house.

When you were a little girl, madam," he said, gesturing to her, "was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?

Fuck it. I gave up smoking. and I can give up love.

the grief...had never been over him, a clumsy foreign child. It had always been for themselves, so young then, learning that you could not tailor your hopes like a suit and expect them to fit forever

All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.

It is a surprise to me to like myself; among all the elaborate possibilities I contemplated for my future, that never figured. My hard-won contentment reflects the simple truth that inner peace often hinges on outer peace. In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, "If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

Without self-discovery," Hahn wrote, extending an idea of Nietzsche's, "a person may still have self-confidence, but it is a self-confidence built on ignorance and it melts in the face of heavy burdens.

After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity, you need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph. Evincing a better self, in response to things that have caused you hurt.

Cleaving to our own lives, with all their challenges and limitations and particularities, is vital.

We do not seek painful experiences that adhere to our identities but rather we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences