Quotes About Self-discovery

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

The, world is not, as a great existential philosopher has seen it, a manuscript written in a code we have to decipher. No, the world is no manuscript which we are asked to decipher, but cannot; it is, rather, a record which we have to dictate ourselves.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.

Just as the boomerang returns to the hunter who has thrown it, only if it has missed its target, man returns to himself, reflects upon himself and becomes over-concerned with self-interpretation only when he has missed his mission, and has been frustrated in his search for meaning.

H]uman freedom implies man's capacity to detach himself from himself.

Meaning must be found; it cannot be given. And it must be found by oneself, by one's own conscience.

It is a tenet of Logotherapy that transcendence is the essence of existence. What is meant by this tenet is that existence is authentic only to the extent to which it points to something that is not itself. [...] Man [...] finds himself only to the extent to which he loses himself in the first place, be it for the sake of something or somebody, for the sake of a cause or a fellow-man, or "for God's sake.

It was like picking up a book and reading the things the main character did and said and his description and thinking vaguely, at first, Why, I'm that way a little. Then more, until the realization comes like a giant boulder down the hill and crashes into you, pulverizing you with the knowledge that this is you, this character.

Sexuality is one of the most important ways in which we identify, establish, and maintain our boundaries.

The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

I will not be famous, great. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people...Think of things in themselves.

If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women...

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

for unless I am myself, I am nobody.

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.

Here am I shedding one of my life-skins and all they will say is, 'Bernard is spending ten days in Rome'.