Quotes About Self-discovery

Simplicity is submission to the will of God; you cannot escape from Him. And they are simple. They do not talk, but act. The spoken word is silver but the unspoken is golden. Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself.

Now then, leave the children to themselves

people invite me out and tell me all about myself.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. - W. B. Yeats

La soledad es para el alma la magnífica ocasión de conocerse, de vigilarse, de formarse a sí misma

I write to murder the selves that whisper untruths to me.

and to hell with all the glories of loneliness.

You're wasting your time," he said. "You don't learn how to discover things by reading books on it. And psychology is a bunch of bullshit.

I think it's my adventure, my trip, my journey, and I guess my attitude is, let the chips fall where they may.

I might get to know something about myself that millions of others know better than I. If I could only see myself as others see me.

To come to the table is to learn to be our real selves—not some construct conceived by someone else, but who God made us to be.

I get a friend to travel with me... I need somebody to bring me back to who I am. It's hard to be alone.

Things may happen around you, and things may happen to you, but the only things that really count are the things that happen in you." 

There comes a time when you have to drop your burdens in order to fight for yourself and your dreams. Many of us carry baggage from the past that hinders our ability to fight for the things we want in life, our goals, our dreams. If you learn in this book to let go of those burdensome emotions and memories, then one of my chief objectives will be realized; you will be able to pursue and live your dreams.

What lies behind us and what lies before us, are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within us out into the world, miracles happen." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

Why would a happily married man isolate himself this way, standing in meditation through the night?

You have to find yourself. When you meet him again, you have to know who you are. He's finding out who he is.

It's a beauty one isn't born with, but must fight to construct at great sacrifice.

I didn't regret the decision to take hormones. I wouldn't have survived much longer without passing. And the surgery was a gift to myself, a coming home to my body. But I wanted more than to just barely exist, a stranger always trying not to get involved. I wanted to find out who I was, to define myself. Whoever I was, I wanted to deal with it, I wanted to live it again. I wanted to be able to explain my life, how the world looked from behind my eyes.

All the girls and women looked pretty much the same, so did all the boys and men. I couldn't find myself among the girls. I had never seen any adult woman who looked like I thought I would when I grew up. There were no women on television like the small woman reflected in this mirror, none on the streets. I knew. I was always searching.

Every day the men around me came to exercise their bodies; I came to exorcise my demons

I stared far back into my past and remembered the child who couldn't be catalogued by Sears. I saw her standing in front of her own mirror, in her father's suit, asking me if I was the person she would grow up to become. Yes, I answered her. And I thought how brave she was to have begun this journey, to have withstood the towering judgments.

I had learned a lot in three weeks. I realized that the world could do more than just judge me, it wielded tremendous power over me.

very quickly I discovered that passing didn't just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside.