Quotes About Soul-searching

Prayer draws us near to our own souls.

What do I really want? he thinks. This is, of course, an extremely good question. It was just such a pity that, life being as it tended to be, it so rarely came as part of a matched pair, with an extremely good answer.

Religious life is an encounter with the living God. Sometimes that encounter is preceded by a kind of soul-searching agony that tries desperately not to hear, runs in the opposite direction, and frantically tries to reason itself out of answering the invitation.

You lost your god here in the flower of Babylon.

Because if you imagine yourself truly alone, islanded off from everybody else, you end up facing, whether you want to or not, a lot of gnarly, unsettling questions.

Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.

And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.

We are warmed by fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul which is the principle of all our acts.

And everything seemed to conspire to encourage me to cut myself off from everybody else and go my own way.

It's so hard to see when my eyes are on me.

I knew that I had to find the answer out of my deepest self

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid their own souls.

I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

To be or not to be: that is the question. That's from Hamlet's - maybe Shakespeare's - most famous soliloquy. I had to memorize the whole speech for sophomore English, and I can still remember every word. I didn't give it much thought back then. I just wanted to get all the words right and collect my A.

Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.

He thought, this is hell, not being able to live with oneself.

You can't lie to your soul.

If I ever feel that acting is just soul-sucking and I don't want to do it anymore, I could stop.

How'd it feel?" Rube asked himself. "I don't know exactly, but it made me want to howl.

I like stories about people who have to go into darkness for a good reason and then have to figure out how to deal with the darkness that seeps into their souls.

Perhaps, thought Talon, there was a path in between. A way to shed their ignorance without losing their souls.

Ain't no one gonna tell you what's in your heart, he tells Lev. You gotta find that out for yourself.

It seems I have not been truly myself for a long time," he says, barely whispering, a dry, papery sound like files shuffling in a dead document archive.

What makes us leave what we love best? What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself When we need it most, That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake And holds us flush there until we begin to love it And have to begin again? What is it within our own lives we decline to live Whenever we find it, making our days unendurable, And nights almost visionless? I still don't know yet, but I do it.