Quotes About Self-discovery

The beasts and the trees will one day share with us a new creation and we will see them as God sees them and know that they are very good. Meanwhile, if we embrace them for themselves, we discover both them and ourselves as evil. This is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—disgust with the things we have misused and hatred of ourselves for misusing them.

First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find out the meaning of life, no doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting this responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person of false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself with glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.

Thomas Merton

I cannot discover God in myself and myself in Him unless I have the courage to face myself exactly as I am, with all my limitations, and to accept others as they are, with all their limitations.

Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. But

True solitude is a participation in the solitariness of God—Who is in all things. Solitude is not a matter of being something more than other men, except by accident: for those who cannot be alone cannot find their true being and they are less than themselves. Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which men, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death.

We are warmed by fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul which is the principle of all our acts.

When solitude was a problem, I had no solitude. When it ceased to be a problem I found I already possessed it, and could have possessed it all along.

Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.

We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we can everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time, before we can go out to others we must find ourselves.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life itself solves them for you. Usually the solution consists in a discovery that they only existed insofar as they were inseparably connected with your own illusory exterior self.

And everything seemed to conspire to encourage me to cut myself off from everybody else and go my own way.

It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another mans city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else's life?

You discover that when you are doing the right work, you are the right person.

Your first task is to find the place where your soul is at home.

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible….

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming…. This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it's no longer so. I feel happy—deep down. All is well.

It is true when you are by yourself and you think about life, it is always sad. All that excitement and so on has a way of suddenly leaving you, and it's as though, in the silence, somebody called your name, and you heard your name for the first time.

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

You put me in touch with my own soul.

Que noche! dijo -¿Conosce usted ese poema de Safo sobre sus manos en las estrellas...? Soy curiosamente sáfica. Y eso es tan importante... No sólo soy sáfica; encuentro en las obras de arte de todos los grandes autores, sobre todo en sus cartas inédtas, cierto aire, cierto indicio de mí misma... cierto parecido, cierta parte de mí misma, como mil reflejos de mis propias manos en un espejo oscuro El espirítu moderno - En un balneario alemán

The only way to truly recover from a dysfunctional childhood and create an authentic life is to face your feelings, acknowledge them, express them freely, and let them go. Feelings are a normal part of being human, and they're meant to be fully expressed.

As you begin to see yourself, your family, and the old, outmoded behavior patterns that run your life with more clarity, you're taking steps to live more deeply from your authentic self.