Quotes About Self-discovery

Like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight, there's no need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we already are - as soon as we stop pretending we're small or unholy.

If you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail; if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there's no success like failure

I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him . . . I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck . . . Wherever I am, I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.

If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.

Shedding off one more layer of skin Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

maybe some of us need to write what we are afraid to know or face. I see many writers who avoid writing what they should be writing because it would mean confronting their fears. Be curious about your fear—it's a cave, but instead of a monster lurking inside there is treasure instead.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.

Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know.

I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know...

I changed into a quiet girl, with an inner life that burned with such ferocity that I had no words to express it.

Le paradoxe de la condition humaine, c'est qu'on ne peut devenir soi-même que sous l'influence des autres.

How can you be yourself when you are being blown in a million different directions you can't control?

E como os homens estão enormes e desnorteados! A senhora notou? Como se cada um estivesse esmagado por si mesmo, pela força heroica que descobriu em si.

If I've learned one thing over the years, it's that every person you encounter brings out a different part of you.

She lived quite alone and whether the fault was hers or whether the fault was theirs I do not know. And a great deal of time went by and she did not speak to a living soul and a great wind of madness howled through her and overturned all her languages. And she forgot Italian, forgot English, forgot Latin, forgot Basque, forgot Welsh, forgot every thing in the world except Cat – and that, it is said, she spoke marvellously well.

Piranesi. It is what he calls me. Which is strange because as far as I can remember it is not my name.

Thus, our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.

Greece was a long lesson in my insignificance.

This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted. I could revise the empty space inside me so that it had a better shape: the outline of a happy childhood.

I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.

Luchar por una idea sin tener una idea de uno mismo es una de las cosas más peligrosas que se pueden hacer.

Al bajar a tierra me di cuenta de que la mochila que llevaba sobre mis espaldas pesaba tanto como el siglo que estaba a punto de terminar, que había llegado el momento de detenerme y de mirar lo que contenía, sacar una a una todas las piedras y darles finalmente un nombre, catalogarlas y después decidir si era el caso de llevarlas conmigo o, en cambio, de abandonarlas.