Quotes About Self-discovery

One of the most important results you can bring into the world is the you that you really want to be.

Minority is about being an individual. It's like you have to sift through the darkness to find your place and be that individual you want to be your entire life.

Every day I have many choices to make about who I want to be.

I'm my own person, and I want people to know me for who I am.

MOTHER TERESA: Boy, one must participate in one's own salvation. In order to hear, one must be willing to listen.

What is it that we need to overcome in order to truly be "Ourselves"?

With others' help and input, we can see more of who we are and who we've been than with only a limited, flat, one-dimensional self-view.

I am both happy and sad at the same time, and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.

Well, I think that part of being young is not exactly knowing why you do some of the things that you do. And it's by exploring your life or experimenting or making mistakes and learning from them hopefully that you start to forge an identity.

So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.

We only know who we are by trying on various versions of ourselves.

If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. Now we can add a codicil: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save the world.

Our true self remains deeply hidden, incognito, submerged beneath a web of mistaken identities.

And there is that wonderful, haunting voice of the true self that calls to us, that keeps us company as we stride deeper and deeper into the world, determined to save the only soul we really can save.

behind ourself, concealed—should startle most," wrote Emily Dickinson

David S. Reynolds. Walt Whitman. Oxford University Press: USA, 2005

One should be always on the trail of one's own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine.

Beethoven's music has changed my life. What has it given me? It has given me not only inspiration and hope, but a visceral way to work through my own neurotic conflicts—a path through my own inner tangles. Every time I play his sonata, I touch a part of myself that nothing else can reach. And afterward, I have the distinct feeling of having been sorted out.

Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

For a period of time after this discovery, Gandhi walked many miles each day, repeating the mantra to himself until it began to coordinate itself with the movement of his body and breath. The practice not only calmed him, but brought him into periods of bliss and rapture—and, as he said, "opened the doorway to God." Rama, Rama, Rama. Eventually, the mantra developed a life of its own within him. The mantra began to chant itself, arising spontaneously whenever he needed it.

M. K. Gandhi. Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Dover Publications: Mineola, New York, 1983

It is, therefore, a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.

After termination with her analyst in London, Marion would henceforth let her life be guided by an ongoing analysis of her own dream world. "Once we know what the dream world is," she writes, "to be without it is to be rudderless. The dream continually corrects our waking course." Marion, like Jung, came to believe that dreams are the path—circular and meandering as it is—to a knowledge of the exiled self.

Marion Woodman. Rolling Away the Stone. Sounds True Recordings: Boulder, CO, 1989.