Quotes About Self-discovery

It's funny: one starts off thinking one is shrinkingly sensitive & intelligent & always one down & all the rest of it: then at thirty one finds one is a great clumping brute, incapable of appreciating anything finer than a kiss or a kick, roaring our one's hypocrisies at the top of one's voice, thick skinned as a rhino. At least I do.

To be alone then, hearing only breeze, your own breath rising to answer with words you didn't know you knew the pale questions of the full moon, to know for the first time you are without a name or number.

Thus, with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: Fool! said my muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

A habit of solitude in early childhood is not easily broken. Indeed, it may prove lifelong.

Is this what it means to become an adult? Giving up the beliefs which reassure us, which help us to survive?

By embracing your mother wound as your yoga, you transform what has been a hindrance in your life into a teacher of the heart.

The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is.

Writing is… a descent into the self.

Most people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf.

There were times, in the beginning, when I used my journal as a wailing wall, but I learned not to immortalize the darkness. Rereading it was counterproductive. What I needed was a place in which to collect the light.

Everything we are given or learn or possess in any real sense - - the ability to play Beethoven sonata, write books, understand the principles of physics – is intended for one thing: to draw us closer to our selves.

If you don't consider your life a pilgrimage, it gets downgraded to a trip or even an aimless journey. It is we who make that decision.

Home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere, and not the things that tie you down.

Everywhere, in some lights, is a Lonely Place, just as everyone, at moments, is a solitary. Everyone sometimes dances madly when alone, or thumbs through secrets in a drawer. Everyone, at some times, is a continent of one.

Home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.

Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit. Do something that makes you feel insecure.

The paradox of reading is that the path toward ourselves passes through books, but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in - a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom to not end his journey there.

The paradox of reading is that the path toward ourselves passes through books, but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in - a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom not to end his journey there.

The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practiced, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good.

The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practised, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good. . . . God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.

It was only after a visit to a learning centre, where they taught me public speaking, that my personality emerged.

I first visited the Philippines when I was 29. I thought I would feel at home there, but I felt more out of place than I did in the U.S. I discovered I was more American than Filipino. It was shattering because I never felt quite at home in the U.S., either.

In the past, I've visited remote places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldn't ordinarily explore.

I didn't do so well in the academic world, so I think the only way I could express myself was through visual art - anything I could get my hands on, whether it was glassblowing, sculpture, painting, or photography. I always wanted to be a painter. Or a farmer.