Quotes About Self-discovery

The particular human chain we're part of is central to our individual identity. Even if we loathe our families, in order to know ourselves, we seem to need to know about them, just as prologue. Not to know is to live with some of the disorientation and anxiety of the amnesiac.

I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.

And when I found out that I had been living a parallel life, a dishonest life, it crushed me. But I have often thought that it made me a nicer person, I really do. When you are truly humbled, that can happen. I have come to notice this in life. You can become bigger or bitter, that is what I think. And as a result of that pain, I became bigger. Because I understood then how a woman could not know. It had happened, and it had happened to me.

My mother told me in the hospital that day that I was not like my brother and sister: "Look at your life right now. You just went ahead and...did it." Perhaps she meant that I was already ruthless. Perhaps she meant that, but I don't know what my mother meant.

The house where she had raised her son—never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.

Now the dismal autumn days have begun and one has to try and get light from within.

we kind of know who we are, without knowing it.

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.

He wanted to show that man has to return to his most basic nature in order to discover his true self and that everything that is not part of that self, including property and normal social and political obligations, was a useless distraction.

Socrates could do this because he starts with a different question from "What is real?" (although eventually he gets there, too). Socrates was the first also to ask: "What am I?

The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves.

Wanneer er rondom niets te verwachten is, keer je naar binnen.

Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.

I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw — the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can't I say that, Willy?

She had burned through a fair sampling of manhood trying to find someone, not to make her "happy" - that wasn't the point - but to cauterize her relentlessly dripping wounds.

The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.

The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it.

He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

When, that evening, Vatanen slowly ski'd back from Vittumainen Ghyll to Laahkima Gorge, accompanied by his hare, he no longer thought about Kaartinen's strange world. There was a half-moon, and the stars were glimmering faintly in the frozen evening. He had his own world, this one, and it was fine to be here, living alone in one's own way. The hare ambled silently along the trail ahead of the skier, like a pathfinder. Vatanen sang to it.

The artist realizes himself in his work; the mind realizes itself in life.

The most exciting place to discover talent is in yourself

Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence.