Quotes About Self-discovery

I lost myself, and if I hadn't found the beautiful lady, I should never have found myself.

Why know the name of a thing when the thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!" But

Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes?

All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad.

Thus I, who set out to find my Ideal, came back rejoicing that I had lost my Shadow.

Set any one to talk about himself, instead of about other people, and you will have a seam of the precious mental metal opened up to you at once; only ore, most likely, that needs much smelting and refining; or it may be, not gold at all, but a metal which your mental alchemy may turn into gold.

the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!

kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call our self.

Never suspecting what a noble creature he was meant to be, he never saw what a poor creature he was

Los mejores libros son los que nos dicen lo que ya sabemos

The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense, it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order.

Los mejores libros, comprendió, son los que te cuentan lo que ya sabías.

Only child life is real life.

Thy debts are thine enemies who have run thee out of Babylon', Sira had said. Yes, it was so. Why had I refused to stand my ground like a man? Why had I permitted my wife to go back to her father? Why had I been weak like a slave if I had not the soul of one? 'Then a strange thing happened. All the world seemed to be of a different color as though I had been looking at it through a colored stone which had suddenly been removed. At last I saw the true values in life.

As for study, did not our wise teacher teach us that learning was of two kinds: the one kind being the things we learned and knew, and the other being the training that taught us how to find out what we did not know?

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.

That's the whole game: Becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf. [...] How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference? -George Saunders

It's kind of crazy but, in my experience, that's the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.

When we find our voice, what's really happening is that we're choosing a voice from among the many voices we're able to do, and we're choosing it beacuse we've found that, of all the voices we contain, it's the one, so far, that has proven itself to be the most energetic.

Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage. We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago and has never had any reason to doubt it.

Have been sleepwalking through life, future reader. Can see that now. Scratch-Off win was like wake-up call. In rush to graduate college, win Pam, get job, make babies, move ahead in job, forgot former feeling of special destiny I used to have when tiny, sitting in cedar-smelling bedroom closet, looking up at blowing trees through high windows, feeling I would someday do something great. Hereby resolve to live life in new and more powerful way, starting THIS MOMENT (!)

That is why I came back. I was wrong in life, limited, shrank everything down to my size, and yet, in the end, there was something light-craving within me, which sent me back, and saved me.

I felt myself a new species of child. Not a boy (most assuredly) but neither a (mere) girl. That skirt-bound race perpetually moving about serving tea had nothing to do with me.