Quotes About Self-discovery

I got something most women got, an experience of staring at women across a distance or being in worlds in which they barely existed, from Moby-Dick to Lord of the Rings. Being so often required to be someone else can stretch thin the sense of self. You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you're facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you.

As Nancy Frey writes of the long-distance pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, 'When pilgrims begin to walk several things usually begin to happen to their perceptions of the world which continue over the course of the journey: they develop a changing sense of time, a heightening of the senses, and a new awareness of their bodies and the landscape....A young German man expressed it this way: 'In the experience of walking, each step is a thought. You can't escape yourself.

There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. Thoreau: 'Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations…' Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.

Introspection is often portrayed as an indoor, solitary thing, the monk in his cell, the writer at her desk.

Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.

As Sidda joined Vivi in staring out into the darkness of the fields, where hundreds of sunflowers grew, she thought: I will never fully know my mother, any more than I will ever know my father or Connor, or myself. I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

Every time I thought that I was put together, I realized that we're always putting ourselves together, gathering the world in, letting it sift down and form us.

sparklers out in front of her. Staring at them, she thought: These are all I have. I do not have the wide, bright beacon of some solid old lighthouse, guiding ships safely home, past the jagged rocks. I only have these little glimmers that flicker and then go out. Let me see my daughter like my mother could never see me. Let her see me, too.

Sidda looked like she could not have been born from my body. This was the first time I ever felt that she was not me: that she was someone else. I didn't like that feeling.

Know your mind and see your nature.

So many of us were taught to keep a lid on anything and everything outrageous. To just turn it off. We turn off our life force, turn off our feelings, turn off our sensuality, and as a consequence, we turn off our power.

Rupture allows the part of a woman that she has outgrown to die and fall away. It updates the parts of us that feel helpless; like we need someone to do it for us. It forces us to take a seat firmly inside of our power. It is required for us to grow.

Als Abenteurer habe ich weder gegen die Natur angekämpft noch mich in ihr verloren. Ich habe gelernt, in ihr zu lesen, sie als gegeben zu respektieren und nicht weiter mit dem Leben zu hadern. Damit bin ich zu meinen Erkenntnissen über die Menschennatur gekommen und zu dem Mut, den Sinn in meinem Tun selbst zu definieren. Niemand hat mich dazu gezwungen. Ständig in der Wildnis unterwegs und vor das Nichts gestellt, zwingt uns die Natur zur Besinnung auf uns selbst.

Let those who want to dance, dance. Let those who can awaken, awake.

The mountain, as Evola describes it in these essays, is portrayed as the guardian of the initiatory threshold over which anyone who wants to be initiated must cross at least once in a lifetime; otherwise it's better never to have been born, because the meaning of life is found only through realizing oneself. But we realize ourselves only by putting ourselves to the test.

The walls that might make others feel like they are suffocating have become my lungs.

ONE OF THE things that meditation teaches us, when we slowly descend into ourselves, is that the sense of peace already exists in us. We all have a deep desire for it even if it's often hidden, masked, thwarted. If we examine human nature carefully, it is good, well disposed, helpful. And it seems to me that nowadays the spirit of harmony is increasing, that our desire to live together calmly is growing stronger and stronger; it's more and more widespread.

Take back your brain. Take back your heart. Live as your soul intended.

You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them. You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.

Why, Jon, why? his mother asked. Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can't you leave low flying to the pelicans, the alhatross? Why don't you eat? Son, you're bone and feathers! I don't mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can't, that's all. I just want to know.

When we put up with any situation we don't have to put up with, it's not because we're dumb. We put up with it, because we want the lesson only that situation can teach, and we want it more than freedom myself.

A moment later Jonathan's body wavered in the air, shimmering, and began to go transparent. "Don't let them spread silly rumors about me, or make me a god. O.K., Fletch? I'm a seagull. I like to fly, maybe…