Quotes About Self-discovery

I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, buy I don't know the way out.

A NOTION OF CHARACTER, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do:

But he found himself rounding syllables like stones in his mouth, silently. He knew he was shy, and thought to be stupid; he was beginning to suspect, thought, that he wasn't stupid. Perhaps not even slow. Merely uneducated. But not, he hoped, uneducable.

I think you know if you're different, he ventured. I think you know if you're gifted. How could you not? You know if you feel set apart, said Nanny, but who doesn't feel that? Maybe we're all gifted. We just don't know it.

I have an idea of who I wish I were, and that obscures my understanding of who I actually am. Sometimes I pretend even to myself to enjoy activities that I don't really enjoy, such as shopping, or to be interested in subjects that don't much interest me, such as foreign policy.

I have an idea of who I wish I were, and that obscures my understanding of who I actually am.

For instance, in The Artist's Way, her influential book about cultivating creativity, Julia Cameron suggests scheduling an "artist's date

Knowing what you admire in others is a wonderful mirror into your deepest, as yet unborn, self.

There's no magic, one-size-fits-all solution to creating a happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative life; we can build a better life only on the foundation of our own nature, our own interests

We often learn most about ourselves by learning about other people

Everyone's happiness project is unique.

would seek happiness in the ways that seemed most natural to me.

The most important thing is to know ourselves, and to choose the strategies that work for us.

Also, as I discovered when I took the Newcastle Personality Assessor, which measures personality according to the Big Five model (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, or OCEAN)

Recognize that you have the courage within you to fulfill the purpose of your birth. Summon forth the power of your inner courage and live the life of your dreams.

She had purchased for herself a blotting-case, stationery, a penholder and some envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she wiped the dust off her shelves, looked at herself in the mirror, took down a book, then, dreaming between the lines, let it fall in her lap. She had a desire to travel, or to go back and live at her convent. She wished both to die and to live in Paris.

He felt better, pleased to have understood, to have caught himself out, and to have revealed the other self which is to be found in each of us.

But you can't be saying I should walk away from everything I have worked for all my life? No, I am not. What I am saying is that we need to take a much closer look at what we have been calling our life. To what purpose? To see if it is really ours. Once we know what is authentically our own, then we also know what to keep and protect and what to let go.

To go beyond yourself, you must first be yourself.

Yeah, I should be in college, Mom, but I'm not. The world is my classroom, and one day I'll write a book, and that will be my degree.

When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.

Dr. George Sheehan once said, "We are each an experiment of one.

One day he lost sight of his retinue in a great forest. These forests are very useful in delivering princes from their courtiers, like a sieve that keeps back the bran. Then the princes get away to follow their fortunes. In this way they have the advantage of the princesses, who are forced to marry before they have had a bit of fun. I wish our princesses got lost in a forest sometimes.

One should never act on what one hears from others, but seek and discover the truth for himself.