Quotes About Self-discovery

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.

The youth felt it would be useless to clear up the problem of his name.

What we must do now is create ourselves—not re-create, but create. This is why it is cruel. When we first did this, we had all the energy of youth. We did not know that attaining our dreams would be impossible—we just went out and got them. Innocence shielded us. Enthusiasm and unflagging confidence got us through. But now we have none of that. Now we are old, wiser, tired.

A crab that sees itself as a crab be defined not by the shelter it seeks but by its very need to seek shelter. I be not a crab. My future be not depending on what I can find to act as a shell. I have many more choices. (Vol'jin Darkspear)

here I'm finally doing this thing that I've known I should be doing since I was in eleventh grade. I was certain, like all of us were, that we were doing the right thing.

It doesn't necessarily have to be about getting anywhere, but about getting through the process of fulfilling your own possibilities.

Hvad udad tabes, skal indad vindes. (What was lost without will be found within.)

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it.

And that was when you realized the fire was inside you all the time. And that was the miracle. Just that.

He didn't want to be what he wasn't, he didn't know how to be what he was.

Naomi was a tough kid, so much tougher than Landsman ever needed to be. She was two years younger, close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove. She was boyish as a girl and mannish as a woman. When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, "In everything but sexual preference.

Crabtree's father was a Pentecostalist preacher somewhere out in Hogscrotum County, MO, and his mother was the editor-in-chief of a magazine for knitting-machine enthusiasts. 'She can make you anything,' went a favorite line of his. 'She made me a queer.' He had been lost to the clutch of Satan since early adolescence and hadn't seen them in years.

Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.

I found out who I was.

Happy is the man who finds refuge in himself.

I'm talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's life. I shrugged again, and smiled. This is my life, I said. It doesn't seem like the wrong one.

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

I knew how I sounded - slow and oafish, like the cousin who gets ditched and goes on playing alone, as if he'd planned it that way. I couldn't quite tell her about the daily beauty, how I didn't tire of seeing 6 a.m. light on the telephone wires. When I was younger, I'd expected to grow out of the gap between the self I knew and what I heard myself say. I'd expected to feel more like one single person.

I was still struggling to invent an alternate version of myself, someone proud and unflinching who could gaze levelly at his father and tell him his last secrets. I wanted him to know me; to have seen me. I'd been waiting until I was settled and fulfilled, so as to present myself in terms of a happiness he might understand.

I believe that our business can provide us with a mirror to see ourselves as we are, to see what we truly know and what we don't know, to see ourselves honestly, directly, and immediately.

these questions: What do I value most? What kind of life do I want? What do I want my life to look like, to feel like? Who do I wish to be?

You must live your story.

My name is Bastian," said the boy. "Bastian Balthazar Bux." "That's a rather odd name," the man grumbled. "All those Bs. Oh well, you can't help it. You didn't choose it. My name is Carl Conrad Coreander.

Und das war sehr wichtig für den kleinen Buben, denn bisher wollte er zwar immer ein anderer sein, als er war, aber er wollte sich nicht ändern.«