Quotes About Self-discovery

The ability to ignore the instant chatter of the mind and to recognize there is something beyond it. There is wisdom beyond it, from the fountain of silence. This is the only way to choose yourself.

Each excuse let me learn about myself, let me discover entire worlds of surprising possibilities. Each one led me to more and more love.

You are the alchemist of your life.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.

The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.

I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. [...] The wind of my life was blowing me away. [...] I take the blue envelope...and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.

If we understood ourselves better we would damage ourselves less.

It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.

She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the imminence of a journey.

He wished he could rescue her, that it was within his power to rescue her and make her life less hard. But it was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making a life bearable -- only love, and love itself mostly failed; and he had never loved her. He had used her to find out something about himself. And even this was not true. He had used her in the hope of avoiding a confrontation with himself which he had, nevertheless, and with a vengeance, been forced to endure.

It had been so once; it had almost been so once. I could make it so again, I could make it real. It only demanded a short, hard strength for me to become myself again.

When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all. That's the only advice you can give anybody. And it's not advice, it's an observation.

I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.

Folks,' said Florence, 'can change their ways much as they want to. But I don't care how many times you change your ways, what's in you is in you, and it's got to come out.

He wanted to enter into, or to forget, the chaos at his center.

Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; and I realized that what I did not know might be in the process of killing me.