Quotes About Self-discovery

And I love light. Perhaps you'll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.

Who am I? But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a suitable answer than something I'd read somewhere.

Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are. That must be it, I thought—to lose your direction is to lose your face.

I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself.

I had no doubt that I could do something, but what, and how? I had no contacts and I believed in nothing. And the obsession with my identity which I had developed in the factory hospital returned with a vengeance. Who was I, how had I come to be?

Running from the birds to what, I didn't know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free." ? Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself.

I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same—except I now recognized my invisibility. So I'd accept it, I'd explore it, rine and heart. I'd

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was...I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

It was exhausting, for no matter what the scheme I conceived, there was one constant flaw—myself. There was no getting around it. I could no more escape than I could think of my identity. Perhaps, I thought, the two things are involved with each other. When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

There's nothing like isolating a man to make him think.

Toata viata am cautat ceva si, oriunde m-as fi indreptat, cineva incerca sa-mi spuna ce este acel ceva. Am acceptat raspunsurile fiecaruia, desi erau deseori contradictorii unele fata de altele sau chiar fata de ele insele. Am fost naiv. Ma cautam pe mine insumi si intrebam pe oricine, mai putin pe mine, intrebari la care eu, si numai eu, puteam gasi raspunsul.

And he'll learn that his index and second fingers are meant for something other than playing the game of stink-finger and pulling his bow.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.

The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

Imitation is suicide.

Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Ne te quaesiveris extra. (Do not seek for things outside of yourself)

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.