Quotes About Self-discovery

'La Mancha' was a gift from me to me. I never thought for a minute it was going to be a hit.

Minute by minute, you decide who you are and who you're likely to be. You make the choices hour by hour, just in the present. I don't believe there's some roadmap laid out that we're headed towards.

If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.

Mindfulness gives you the inner space and quietness that allow you to look deeply, to find out who you are and what you want to do with your life. You won't feel the need to make yourself run after meaningless

Some days we may feel hollow, exhausted, and joyless, not really our true selves. On such days, even if we try to be in touch with others, our efforts will be in vain. The more we try, the more we fail. When this happens, we should stop trying to be in touch with what is outside of ourselves and come back to being in touch with ourselves. We should be alone.

Buddhist teachings are meant to awaken our true self, not merely to add to our storehouse of knowledge.

Beauty and goodness are there in each of us. A true spiritual partner is one who encourages you to look deep inside yourself for the beauty and love you've been seeking. A true teacher is someone who helps you discover the teacher in yourself.

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it's over … we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.

Now we know, as she does, that she can carry on, that discovering that men can't be counted on doesn't mean the world ends, that she's a whole person.

The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.

It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how we wants to grow, how he can become different, how he might become more of what he is capable of being.

Parents can modify themselves, and reduce the number of behaviors that are unacceptable to them, by coming to see that their children are not their children, not extensions of themselves, but separate, unique. A child has the right to become what he is capable of becoming, no matter how different from the parent or the parent's blueprint for the child. This is his inalienable right.

what I appear, a sick and poor man, is not the worst of me. I am in a chaos of principles--groping in the dark--acting by instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best.

the appearance of the third and youngest would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying that he had hardly as yet found the entrane to his professional groove.

What was the past to me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether. I became another woman, filled full of new life from you. How could I be the early one? Why do you not see this? Dear, if you would only be a little more conceited, and believe in yourself so far as to see that you was strong enough to work this change in me, you would perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife.

I thought you were the ghost of yourself.

Estava no período mais brilhante do crescimento masculino, com seus intelectos e emoções claramente separadas. O tempo no qual a influência da juventude indiscriminadamente se misturava à impulsividade havia passado, e ainda não havia chegado à fase em que elas se uniam novamente, pela ingerência de uma esposa ou da família. Resumindo, estava com vinte e oito anos e solteiro.

Just before nightfall, Hannibal approached Lecter castle through the woods. As he looked at his home, his feelings remained curiously flat; it is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.

Before his Becoming, he would not have dared any of this. Now he realized he could do anything. Anything. Anything.

Live right behind your eyes. Listen to yourself.

I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more. ( Letter to John Banister, Jr., June 19, 1787)

I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then, to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punished him who gives in to it. And it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.

Zo wist en wilde de verwarde niets anders meer dan de aanstichter van het vuur dat in hem brandde zonder ophouden te achtervolgen, over hem te dromen wanneer hij er niet was en naar de wijze van de verliefden louter tegen zijn schaduwbeeld tedere woorden te fluisteren. Eenzaamheid, de vreemde omgeving en het geluk van een late en diepe roes moedigden hem aan en haalden hem ertoe over om van zichzelf ook het meest bevreemdende zonder schaamte of blozen te accepteren, (...)