Quotes About Self-discovery

We can only learn to know ourselves and do what we can - namely, surrender our will and fulfill God's will in us.

Gentleness can be developed with simple thoughts. First, appreciate who you are and make friends with yourself. Look at what you can do, and don't allow what you cannot do to oppress you. Rather, regard it as a future adventure. The practice of meditation allows for this development to take place.

Obviously it is not good to keep checking your watch, as you might discover that you have supernatural powers that can slow down the time.

Contemplation is essentially a process of convincing ourselves. We have read books and heard lectures, but now we must make our motivation personal.

Running and meditation are very personal activities. Therefore they are lonely. This loneliness is one of their best qualities because it strengthens our incentive to motivate ourselves.

By viewing images we cast onto outer reality as mirror reflections of inner reality, we come to know ourselves.

You don't know what your voice sounds like until you speak.

There is a saying, 'it's never too late to have a happy childhood'. I'd rephrase that. I'd say, it's never too late to stop a difficult childhood from turning us into unhappy adults.

I thought therapy was a sort of magic, that you just kept talking and the very act of talking unlocked some forgotten key.

In order to break the treaty, we have to learn to ask for and then, just as crucially, accept help. First, though, it is important to understand ourselves, and to discover what it is that we need. Habits set up over a lifetime may be hard to break but, certainly, it is easier once you have identified them.

The Buddhists tell us that in order to find yourself, you first have to lose your mind.

The Buddhists tell us that in order to find yourself, you first have to lose your mind.' It is one of the most consoling things anybody has ever said to me.

For Nathan, I wanted it to be a place where he could breathe out the pressure to perform, to conform, to always be "good" when what was defined as good was almost impossible for him, as God made him, to conform to.

You will never rise to your greatest potential by being all things to all people.

To become more fascinating, you don't have to change who you are. You have to become more of who you are.

It seemed like everyone was wrapping themselves in chrysali and having late-in-life emergences as different kinds of creatures, and what this made clear was that we weren't becoming anything. We felt like caterpillars who didn't know that being a caterpillar wasn't the endgame. We felt like foamy pond water.

Sarah wasn't even called Sarah yet: she was still going by her birth name Sarai, but that name's warrior vibes didn't suit her and so mostly everyone just called her Sari.

I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in... and at certain times in my life, I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing.

In a depressed era when most young adults grasped for any foothold they could find, the nineteen-year-old Smith had already given up a major university scholarship and challenged a prominent magazine's editorial boundaries until he was fired. He wouldn't follow his father's burdened, suit-and-tie path to an early death; he might kill himself, but in a different way.

You must enter the Forest Adventurous at its darkest point, where there is no path. Where there's a path, it is someone else's path. Each human being is a unique phenomenon. The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss.

In seventh grade, false feelings and false faces are the rule.

Sometimes I try to go back and remember the me before I was ever diagnosed with a learning disability, back before I ever knew I was different, back to the time when I was just me, without any labels, when I thought the way I saw the world was how everyone saw it.

When she met my father she was still really good at being quiet. When she met him she realized how she had been collecting silence in a slender, delicate glass jar behind her ribcage. The bottle was not corked and so she always had to be very careful not to spill it.

How does she know herself without a mother? How does she know herself without sound? I guess she knows the shape of things that aren't there instead.