Quotes About Self-discovery

Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion.

The true bodhisattva spirit grows out of this personal sense of freedom. You discover that you don't feel so needy anymore. You don't crave another refueling - with shamatha or with other people's love and attention - because you know within yourself how to be free, how to be confident. With this sense of security and freedom, you begin to direct your attention to the needs of others. The compassion expands.

After imagining and summoning up these embodied aspects of himself, he asked them questions, after which he found they often produced an image, and then the disturbance disappeared.

She's a RainWing," he hissed. "She'd laugh at me just as much as any of her tribe, if she'd met me before I found my power.

Hardly a NightWing at all

Oooo, the perfect title for my memoir," she said, grinning. "Right about Almost Everything, by Cricket.

scrolls. And then we'll figure out for ourselves if we're going

There is no other way to reach enlightenment than by recognizing buddha nature and attaining stability in it. Buddhas of the past did that, and the present-day practitioners who will be the buddhas of the future will do so by recognizing their own nature and attaining stability in it. There is no other way. Nobody else can accomplish enlightenment for us or pull us into liberation. It is completely up to ourselves.

Sometimes when our backs are up against the wall, we can surprise ourselves with what we are truly capable of. We can push off those walls and discover something deep within ourselves. We just have to make sure we do not create walls within ourselves, or between us and other people. Walls are for scaling. Or for knocking down and crumbling.

If you don't know why you like a thing, it is usually worth your while to attempt to find out.

That was what he wanted, to be baked dry and hard, to feel the vaporous worries evaporating one by one, to know finally that all the damp little doubts and hesitations that covered the floor of his being were curling up and expiring in the great furnace-blast of the sun.

Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about un-becoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.

He desired to become the man he was impersonating.

When a student comes and asks, Should I become a mathematician? the answer should be no. If you have to ask, you shouldn't even ask.

He had strawberry blond hair. That's enough right there. That's all you need to know. If you're a man with strawberry blond hair and you're not in the circus or a Viking, odds are you have not found your place in life and never will.

I find myself only by losing myself.

that is rare, isn't it? To be explained by yourself, by what you are and what you do, and not by what you've done, or were, or by what people think you might be or might become. I

The truth about oneself was not 'something given, something which we have to discover – it is something we must create ourselves'. Even

Solitary people make the best travellers

I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about.

All solitary travel offers a sort of special license allowing you to be anyone you want to be

I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.

Paul Theroux

Tourists don't know where they've been. Travellers don't know where they're going.