Quotes About Self-discovery

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong'. Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.

we're constantly waking up to what we're about, what we're really doing in our lives. And the fact is, that's painful. But there's no possibility of freedom without this pain.

On the spiritual path, the purpose of my relationship is to wake up and get to know ourselves and our lover, thoroughly, without judgment or pride. On the spiritual path, we enter into a shared union where we cherish and give to each other, expanding our ability to love unconditionally. We would also accept that the process an be awkward, unpredictable, challenging, and surprising.

More than anything else, I want myself. I want to live with integrity and truth. I'm not going to hide the jewel of who I am, nor will I mask my imperfections. No bargains, no avoiding reality, no conning myself, no lies.

There is no education but self-education.

Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.

These months drive us to listen within.

All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others.

Life's major pursuit is not knowing self . . . but knowing God. . . . Unless God is the major pursuit of our lives, all other pursuits are dead-end streets, including trying to know ourselves. CHARLES R. SWINDOLL (B. 1934)

If you really want to know how you are you, simply pay attention to everything, believe nothing, and don't take anything personally. Everything is a clue. Every resistance, every little bit of miserable conditioning, every cry of helpless victimization brings you a gift of clarity, wisdom, and compassion. Don't miss any of it.

Perhaps the hardest part in finding your courage is remembering how you lost it in the first place. We do not suddenly become people who settle for the ordinary and the safe places. Such things happen to us in increments of time as we bargain away our questing selves for the promises of security.

Have you had stretches of time where dating or serious relationships were nonexistent?

9 Hazard of Singlehood: Facing Love Interests Who Are Now With Others

Cheryl Mendelson

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn't "mean anything" because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.

I never got to be in the driver's seat of my own life," she'd wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. "I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I've always been someone's daughter or mother or wife. I've never just been me." "Oh, Mom," was all I could say as I stroked her hand. I was too young to say anything else.

Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay.

I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.