Quotes About Self-discovery

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying "Amen" to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to keep your soul alive.

With begging and scrambling we find very little, but with being true to ourselves we find a great deal more.

In the world to come they will not ask me, "Why were you not Moses?" They will ask me, "Why were you not Zusya?"

Follow what you love! Don't deign to ask what "they" are looking for out there. Ask what you have inside. Follow not your interests, which change, but what you are and what you love, which will and should not change.

Our concern must be to live while we're alive ... to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.

The self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.

All I would tell people is to hold on to what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You've got to find in on your own terms.

An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.

All serious daring starts from within.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered; it is something moulded.

I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

I didn't belong as a kid, and that always bothered me. If only I'd known that one day my differentness would be an asset, then my early life would have been much easier.

Resolve to be thyself ... he who finds himself loses his misery!

There's a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other people's models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.

All the discontented people I know are trying to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do.

The secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.

To find the good life you must become yourself.

Change occurs when one becomes what she is, not when she tries to become what she is not.

I've finally stopped running away from myself. Who else is there better to be?

At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all, accept these things.

We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.

I looked always outside of myself to see what I could make the world give me instead of looking within myself to see what was there.

It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble, but [we do know] it is our sacred duty.