Quotes About Self-discovery

Working identity is not just who we are. It is also who we are not. Being able to discard possibilities means we are making progress.

Most people who have made big career changes have heard loved ones tell them, "You're out of your mind." Sabotage is not their intention, but a shared history has entrenched certain expectations, and reinventing oneself can amount to breaking the implicit "contract." People who have quit smoking, lost weight, or gotten divorced are familiar with the mixed reactions of friends, who see the change as loss.

Sometimes the best way to find oneself is to flirt with many possibilities.

Peaceful Warrior

Why is it that when Robert Redford-cum-Denys Finch Hatton flies away in the golden glow out of Africa, he is pursuing his destiny? And when I walk away I'm just a chick who's scared of commitment and on the run, who's weird for ignoring Glamour magazine's predictions of my eggs drying up? Learning is an underrated form of liberation.

If there's one thing the divas have shown it is that to indulge your passions fully is to know yourself completely. Only then can you treat the rest of the world--its people, its ecosystems, its politics-- with provocative wit and compassion.

she loses not only her mother but also the encouragement and revalidation of the self she needs as well as the real sharing she would want to do with her mother at that time." It

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have.

WITCH lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh-suffocating clothes our sick society demands. There is no "joining" WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a WITCH. You make your own rules.

The mystique that Friedan spoke of was the image of the woman as mother, wife, living through her husband, through her children, giving up her own dreams for that. She concluded: The only way for a woman as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.

I didn't treat my girl like she was mine Yeah, I thought I didn't need her at the time But I changed my way of thinkin' when she left Yeah, I finally learned my lesson, but I learned it by myself

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn't say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.

You won't find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains.

I'm sure I must have sounded like a fool and a borderline psychotic most of that year, when I talked to people who thought they knew who and where they were at the time ... but looking back, I see that if I wasn't Right, at least I wasn't Wrong, and in that context I was forced to learn from my confusion ... which took awhile, and there's still no proof that what I finally learned was Right, but there's not a hell of a lot of evidence to show that I'm Wrong either.

To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES. But don't misunderstand me. I don't mean that we can't BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal.

Unless I weaken—and I might—I think I'll be sure I can fly before I return to the nest. It should be interesting Ã¢â'¬Â¦ if nothing else.

I was just running away from the person I'd been for the past five years. I wasn't particularly pleased with the person I was now, but I had hated and despised the other one, and I was glad to be rid of her face.

Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.

I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.

Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.

Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.

Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.

Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson's Clarissa .