Quotes About Self-discovery

In 1907 Edmund Gosse thought he had to leave his father to become himself; seventy years later Geoffrey Wolff knows he cannot leave his father because he has become his father.

In studying history we are finding out about ourselves, and in the last resort the natural sciences and even mathematics have the same final end.

Se necesita más coraje para escudriñar los rincones oscuros de tu propia alma que para luchar en un campo de batalla.

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them -- the one, in fact, which is not a mask.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.

Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.

All we are not stares back at what we are.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

For the others, like me, there is only the flash Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass To meet one's madness

Human "nature" is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before.

Every man carries within him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow. A parlor game for a wet afternoon – imaging the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever one looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another.

In my youth I believed in somewhere else I put my faith in travel now I am becoming my own tree

As those who are gone now keep wandering through our words sounds of paper following them at untold distances so I wake again in the old house where at times I have believed that I was waiting for myself and many years have gone taking with them the semblance of youth reason after reason ranges of blue hills who did I think was missing those days neither here nor there my own dog waiting to be known

In my youth I believed in somewhere else I put faith in travel now I am becoming my own tree — W.S. Merwin, from "Wild Oats," The Moon Before Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)

I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.

O nobly born…. Be not daunted…nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own nature. Recognize it.

It's really something for people who are approaching 30 to take a look at what that means to them. I think turning 30 is a chance to re-identify with yourself.

Many people wait throughout their whole lives for the chance to be good in their own fashion.

We're all more than the person we show to everyone else. At least I hope so. Because I feel like there's more to me than that. I just haven't had the chance yet to show it.

If any one hates to be alone with himself, the chances are that he has not much of any self to be alone with.

It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself

Anger can be a wonderful wake up call to help you understand what you need and what you value.