SELF-AWARENESS/SELF-DISCOVERY
1. A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything. ~Samuel Johnson
2. A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. ~George Moore
3. A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
4. A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it. ~Jean de La Fontaine
5. All men should strive, to learn before they die; what they are running from, and to, and why. ~James Thurber
6. And if you find everything as soon as you look for it, you find it in vain, you look for it in vain. ~Antonio Porchia
7. Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
8. Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. ~Carl G. Jung
9. By all means use sometimes to be alone. Salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear. ~George Herbert
10. Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal. ~Russell Lynes
11. Endurance is frequently a form of indecision. ~Elizabeth Bibesco
12. Every one of us has in him a continent of undiscovered character. Blessed is he who acts the Columbus to his own soul. ~Unknown
13. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
14. For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed. ~Clifton Fadiman
15. For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipators. ~Logan Pearsall Smith
16. God hides things by putting them all around us. ~Unknown
17. God, why do I storm heaven for answers that are already in my heart? Every grace I need has already been given me. Oh, lead me to the Beyond within. ~Macrina Wieherkehr
18. He who knows others is learned; He who knows himself is wise. ~Lao-tzu, Tao te Ching
19. I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want. ~Mark Twain
20. I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of. ~Michel de Montaigne
21. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. ~Douglas Adams
22. I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself. ~James Baldwin
23. I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience - and laughter. ~Susan M. Watkins
24. I went on to discover that in its deepest sense, the will is not primarily the faculty of desire for anything known, but rather, the desire for something unknown, animate desire for something that lies beyond ourselves, a longing for something we know is missing in us. ~Bernadette Roberts
25. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. ~Henry David Thoreau,
26. If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life. ~James A. Michener
27. If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead. ~Gelett Burgess
28. If you aren't sure who you are, you might as well work on who you want to be. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
29. If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven’t been born yet. ~Neil Simon
30. If you don't get lost, there's a chance you may never be found. ~Unknown
31. If you haven't had at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature. ~Phyllis Battelle
32. If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions. ~Author Unknown
33. In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it. This is true of countries, of persons, and of oneself. ~André Gide
34. In search of my mother's garden, I found my own. ~Alice Walker
35. It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling. ~Robert M. Pirsig
36. It is good to feel lost... because it proves you have a navigational sense of where "Home" is. You know that a place that feels like being found exists. And maybe our current location isn't that place but, Hallelujah, that unsettled, uneasy feeling f lost-ness just brought you closer to it. ~Erika Harris, lifeblazing.com
37. It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. ~H.W. Shaw
38. It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts. ~K.T. Jong
39. It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy. ~Lucille Ball
40. It's terrifying to see someone inside of whom a vital spring seems to have been broken. It's particularly terrifying to see him in your mirror. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook,
41. Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes. ~Hugh Prather
42. Know thyself, or at least keep renewing the acquaintance. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
43. "Know thyself?" If I knew myself, I'd run away. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
44. Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time. ~Timothy Leary
45. Let your heart guide you. It whispers, so listen carefully. ~Littlefoot's mother, Land Before Time
46. Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. ~Anaïs Nin
47. Like an old gold-panning prospector, you must resign yourself to digging up a lot of sand from which you will later patiently wash out a few minute particles of gold ore. ~Dorothy Bryant
48. Little by little, through patience and repeated effort, the mind will become stilled in the Self. ~Bhagavad Gita
49. Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
50. Man can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as... from a lack of bread. ~Richard Wright, Native Son,
51. Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. ~Dr. Alexis Carrel
52. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. ~Oscar Wilde
53. Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, he wants to reestablish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys. ~Amiel, Journal,
54. Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it's dark. ~Zen Proverb
55. Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality. ~Erich Fromm
56. Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering. ~St. Augustine
57. Never be afraid to sit awhile and think. ~Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
58. Never mind searching for who you are. Search for the person you aspire to be. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
59. No one remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself. ~Thomas Mann
60. No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, , translated from French by Lewis Galantière
61. Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. ~Henry David Thoreau
62. Nothing is true in self-discovery unless it is true in your own experience. This is the only protection against the robot levels of the mind. ~Barry Long
63. Nurture your dreams, Discover your passion, Embrace your visions, Free your spirit, Share your love, Love your soul. ~Vicki Virk
64. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. ~G.K. Chesterton
65. One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
66. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
67. People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates. ~Thomas Szasz, "Personal Conduct," The Second Sin,
68. Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. ~Wallace Stevens
69. Quality begins on the inside... and then works its way out. ~Bob Moawad
70. Readjusting is a painful process, but most of us need it at one time or another. ~Arthur Christopher Benson
71. Real birthdays are not annual affairs. Real birthdays are the days when we have a new birth. ~Ralph Parlette
72. Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery. ~Matthew Arnold
73. Some people say they haven't yet found themselves. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates. ~Thomas Szasz
74. That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along. ~Madeleine L'Engle
75. The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live. ~Nicolas Chamfort
76. The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one's opinion but rather to know it. ~André Maurois
77. The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart. ~Julien Green
78. The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused.... We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery. ~Nisargadatta
79. The truth is that it is natural, as well as necessary, for every man to be a vagabond occasionally. ~Samuel H. Hammond
80. The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose. ~Richard Grant
81. There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud. ~Carol Shields
82. There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away. ~Henry Ward Beecher
83. There are... things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky
84. There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~Anaïs Nin
85. There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms. ~George Eliot
86. There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. ~Josephine Hart
87. There is deep wisdom within our very flesh, if we can only come to our senses and feel it. ~Elizabeth A. Behnke
88. There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. ~Nelson Mandela
89. There's a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside. ~Pearl Bailey
90. They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom. ~Confucius
91. Those who are brutally honest are seldom so with themselves. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook,
92. To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet. ~Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon,
93. To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying "Amen" to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to keep your soul alive. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
94. To the question of your life you are the answer, and to the problems of your life you are the solution. ~Joe Cordare
95. Truth hurts - not the searching after; the running from! ~John Eyberg
96. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. ~Alan Watts
97. We are the products of editing, rather than authorship. ~George Wald
98. We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognize and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses - secret senses, sixth senses, if you will - equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded. ~Oliver Sacks
99. We need to find the courage to say 'NO' to the things and people that are not serving us if we want to rediscover ourselves and live our lives with authenticity. ~Barbara De Angelis
100. We run away all the time to avoid coming face to face with ourselves. ~Unknown
101. When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before. ~Clifton Fadiman
102. When your heart speaks, take good notes. ~Judith Campbell
103. Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself. ~William Butler Yeats
104. You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one. ~James A. Froude
105. You cannot fully understand your own life without knowing and thinking beyond your life, your own neighborhood, and even your own nation. ~Johnnetta Cole
106. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself. ~Alan Alda
107. You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need. ~Jerry Gillies
108. You'll never find peace of mind until you listen to your heart. ~George Michael, "Kissing A Fool"
109. Your distress about life might mean you have been living for the wrong reason, not that you have no reason for living. ~Tom O'Connor
110. Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it. ~Buddha