Quotes About Self-discovery

From your parents you learn love & laughter & how to put one foot in front of the other. But when books are opened, you discover you have wings.

A man can't make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.

What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.

The point of telling our stories, even if only to ourselves, is to help us resurrect the parts we have buried. When we unearth them, even if it's difficult, we can integrate them into our sense of who we are. Often in our buried self our true power lies.

In the journey to become whole, a woman will be confronted with various forms of these stages [of personal evolution]. In doing the hard work that is required, she learns important lessons about herself and increases her capacity to see the meaning of her actions. She is then able to bring more experience, wisdom, and skill to the next challenge she must face.

Sojourner [Truth]'s life exemplifies the process that occurs within ourselves as we grow to understand that we hold the authority to shape our own lives. This inner authority came when she embraced all of herself, which enabled her to speak from an authentic voice.

And that's not all the bad news. Another powerful component of our Imago is that we also seek the qualities missing in ourselves—both good and bad—that got lost in the shuffle of socialization.

Pain shapes us, breaking us open so that we can reconfigure ourselves in a way that more deeply mirrors our authentic self.

Perhaps you are thinking: I don't care about sport. Well, neither did I. But now I realise that's partly because sport did not seem to have a place for me.

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards.

what I should have realised, too, on those northern roads, is that what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done. But watching television from the sofa later that evening I notice tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps

But what I should have realised, too, on those northern roads, is that what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

It takes a long time to be yourself, in the presence of a new hawk.

I'd turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own.

I can't help but think of a line written by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude.

First you try to find a reason, try to understand what you've done so wrong so you can be sure not to do it anymore. After that you look for signs of a Jekyll and Hyde situation, the good and the bad in a person sifted into separate compartments by some weird accident. Then, gradually, you realize that there isn't a reason, and it isn't two people you're dealing with, just one. The same one every time.

I would like to have nothing to do with you for hours on end and then come back and find you, come back with things I've thought and found all on my own— on my own, not through you.

what they'd been afraid of was running out of self. On the contrary the more they loved the more there was to love.

She didn't look into the mirror itself. She was becoming someone, it seemed. She had read somewhere that you only became a woman once your mother had died. But that wasn't what worried her. She worried about becoming as perfect as the person shown to her on paper in Lily's studio.

She found a mirror and turned around in front of it with her arms held out in front of her. She was all there, all in one piece. Then what? What had she lost?

the fact that I was dreaming of retirement at the age of 33 was probably an indicator that something had to change. I

The Course asks us to read its words slowly and carefully, thinking about what they mean. It asks us to take them personally and treat them as practical, as more than an intellectual game. If we will do this with the Text, we will experience our old worldview being slowly dismantled and a new worldview arising in its place.

It took me ages to grow into being a woman, into being happy with it.