Quotes About Self-discovery

Connie woke up to the existence of legs. They became more important to her than faces, which are no longer very real.

Those who go searching for love only find their own lovelessness. But the loveless never find love; only the loving find love, and they never have to search for it.

There was nothing for her anywhere, but this black disintegration. Yet, within all the great attack of disintegration upon her, she remained herself. It was the terrible core of all her suffering, that she was always herself. Never could she escape that: she could not put off being herself.

Clarifying the Way means that we determine the point we should aim at throughout our lives, based on the self that is only the self and life that is only life. This is the sole great matter, and this is what completing the sole great matter of one's life means. True practice begins at this point.

Looking deeply into the writings and sutras of past teachers does not mean to learn something that is unrelated to us. Studying ancient writings means to study our lives. To study the Tenzo Ky?kun came to mean for me that I would be studying my own life.

D?gen says here that to study Buddhism means to study one's Self; to learn Buddhism is to learn one's Self.

When we discover that the truth is already in us, we are all at once our original selves.

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.

Over three hundred years ago Galileo said:   You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.

most people go through college and learn to read Virgil and master the mysteries of calculus without ever discovering how their own minds function.

He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?

How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding--if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downtown and get a job, perhaps as an airline stewardess. Think how wonderful it would be to fly to Houston and back three times a week for the next twenty years. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. It would be wonderful.

In some evolving civilizations, for reasons which we don't entirely understand, the evolution of consciousness is attended by a disaster of some sort which occurs shortly after the Sy breakthrough. It has something to do with the discovery of the self and the incapacity to deal with it, the consciousness becoming self-conscious but not knowing what to do with the self, not even knowing what its self is, and so ending by being that which is not, and making others what they are not.

I came to myself, saw myself as itself and the world for what it is, and began to love life. Hm, better stop the bleeding in that case. After all, why not live? Bad as things are still when all is said and done, one can sit on a doorstep in the winter sunlight and watch sparrows kick leaves.

Audry Hepburn on the cover of The Nun's Story was staring up at me from my unmade bed. Her hair was hidden by her snow-white wimple; her big eyes looked frightened. What are you looking at? I said. Fuck you. It was the first time I'd ever said the word. I felt a brief shiver of power. Then I sat back on the bed and sobbed. Dolores Price: Lady of Sorrow.

The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness. Perhaps, Dominick, you have yet to emerge fully from the pond where you swam that morning so long ago. And perhaps, when you do, you will no longer look into the water and see the reflection of a son of a bithc.

I'd gone to her directly from Dr. Shaw's office - gone without an appointment to find out if happiness was a football you caught or something more complicated, something you had to invent.

Don't write stories for teenagers or any other group," she advised. "Write them for yourself and let the audience that needs them find them.

It's a free country," I said. "Granny babes." That night up in my room I pulled Ma's flying leg out from behind the dresser and saw, for the first time, that it was beautiful. I hung it above my bed.

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life

re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body. [From the preface to Leaves Grass]

From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines.

You have not known what you are--you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return? The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;