Quotes About Self-discovery

When man is not permitted to be himself, he cannot be encountered.

They didn't take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some reason, having nothing to do with real life. I couldn't challenge or contradict this view, even to myself, because I really didn't know how to do anything real. I didn't know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn't a self-improvement project.

For the first time in my life, I couldn't think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn't say what you were supposed to do.

It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What's the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too. It would be like one of those Marguerite Duras books I tried to read in Svetlana's aunt's apartment. Elle pleure. Il pleure. Ils pleurent, tous les deux.

I wondered why he had told me something so terrible about himself.

It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What's the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry too. It would be like one of those Marguerite Duras books I tried to read in Svetlana's aunt's apartment.

At the T stop, I stared fixedly ahead, as tears streamed down my face, and my nasal passages shut down. Was this the "work" you had to do? Was I getting better?

But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year–maybe as many as seven years–to learn to feel nineteen.

All writers, I think, are to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves.

Gape long enough into a looking glass and you'll eventually see beauty. The same can be said of self-analysis, and as soon as one apes oneself, a second monkey is born.

What distinguishes the Jungian approach to developmental psychology from virtually all others is the idea that even in old age we are growing towards realization of our full potential.

How can we enable the unconscious to realize itself? By granting it freedom of expression and then examining what it has expressed.

Those who toe the party line do not choose their own way but submerge their potential for wholeness in a relatively unconscious existence of collective conformity.

I once had a conversation with the director of a monastery. "Everyone who comes to us," he said, "does so for the wrong reasons." The same is generally true of people who become psychotherapists. It is sometimes possible to persuade people to be come psychotherapists who have not chosen the profession for their own personal reasons; but, for the most part, we have to put up with what we get; namely, ourselves.

No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.' De Quincey

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in the universe through what he creates. He finds this a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people, but which has its own separate validity. His most significant moments are those in which he attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone.

It is better to live one day on the planet being true to yourself than an entire lifetime which is a lie.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.

Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself

Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.

It is not sufficient to tell native kids to be proud of who they are if we do not also at the same time tell them who they are. The struggle in connecting young people to their traditions is compounded by a school system that consistently provides opportunities to learn about others but very few for native kids to learn about themselves. We have a lot of work to do.

Llega a ser lo que eres».

Adults were always quick to tell her how much she looked like her mother, and how little like her father. Though Anna thought that on the inside she was much more like him. There was this strong, unbreakable will in her to fight for something, somwhere. But where? for what? and against whom?