Quotes About Self-discovery

He did not recognize himself either. He was a totally new being, bald, covered with grease and blood, pink and blue eyed: he was his own baby...He was a great fat chuckling baby, and he shat and peed in his filthy trousers and kept driving.

The path to wisdom leads downward, and anyone who decides to take it had better buckle on armor, remember to bring a sword, and get used to the idea that when and if he gets back everyone he talks to is going to think he's a phony.

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.

Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but . . . life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Looking back, I think my struggle with Jerry taught me things about myself that I couldn't have learned any other way. The Dalai Lama calls it "the enemy's gift." From a Buddhist perspective, battling with enemies can help you develop greater compassion for and tolerance of others.

I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself.

Because of an imaginary voice, Nicholas had become a whole person; rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial person, never knowing completeness.

To my surprise I realized that I had stopped shaking. It was as if I had been shaking all my life, from a chronic undercurrent of fear.

Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

But suppose your dæmon settles in a shape you don't like? Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is. But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up.

Lyra had to adjust to her new sense of her own story, and that couldn't be done in a day.

You know, it isn't really surprising that there are things about ourselves that still remain a mystery to us," he said. "Maybe we should be comforted that the knowledge is there, even if it's withheld for a while.

Just be yourself. You don't have to put on an act. To be myself, I have to put on an act, Ginny said bitterly. What's that mean? It means I don't know who I am.

Well, all right then. Finding out that you're an Arctic hare – that's surprising. Damn, I was surprised. Surprised? Why the hell were you surprised? I ain't surprised, said Hester. Iorek's right. I always knew I had more class than a rabbit.

But in another way it was easy, because it made sense. For the first time ever I felt I was doing something with all of my nature and not only a part of it. So it was lonely for a while but then I got used to it.

I don't know where I belong, so I'm free. No one's got a hold on me.

She wasn't sure what she wanted to do, except that she knew that if she fooled around for long enough, without fretting, or nagging herself, she'd find out.

Todo hombre está en poder de su espectro hasta que llega la hora en que su humanidad despierta… William Blake

They gave her another image: she was enticing monsters out of the darkness of herself.

Who are they now? They are the simplest version possible of themselves... They are out from under everything ever piled on top of them.

My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No otherness to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.

For all that I announce at intervals that I want to go mad, it is apparently impossible: beyond me, beneath me. It took This for me to learn that I am a citadel of sanity.

But by the third year he had come to wonder whether Laura's purpose wasn't the shield behind which he was still hiding his own, even from himself.

There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness—not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it.