Quotes About Self-discovery

Carolyn Heilbrun

Building my career hasn't been attached to my dad. It's been me figuring things out for myself.

Dear Dad, When you sent me to school that morning, I thought you loved me. But now I see you for what you are. You called me a monster and a freak. But you're the one that raised me.

I went from living in my dad's basement to moving to New York. So I never had that middle ground of easing into adulthood.

I'm not dating anyone. I don't even know where I am half of the time.

I must have been yearning for some Jewish content beyond my genetic makeup because soon after my 21st birthday, I noticed I was no longer dating WASPs.

We don't know what kind of people we truly are until the moment before our deaths. As death comes to embrace you, you will realize what you are. That's what death is, don't you think?

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?

The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.

She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.

Dying to be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing.

It's never been easy to say what you really are, Mickey." "Oh, failure will do." "But at what?" "Failure at failing, for one.

On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka "nested dolls" that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)

God already knows who we are; we are the ones who must find a way to come to terms with our true selves.

He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.

Some of us are born to a solitary life.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.

If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with. —Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz

Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?

Now it was done. He was free of Xanth forever. Free to make his own life, without being ridiculed or mothered or tempted. Free to be himself. Bink put his face in his hands and cried.

Become what you are, having learned what that is.

But I have no time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is this. I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to be ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that.

La virtud con sus dones diversos nace de la inspiración de una naturaleza honesta, que por su propio esfuerzo abraza a la vez la esencia y todos los modos, debido al sentimiento innato del bien, que la precede y que la crea. Esta ciencia verdaderamente anterior y superior a la virtud, ninguno puede enseñarla, porque cada uno debe sacarla de sí mismo; nace con nosotros.