self-discovery quotes

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

You don’t have to be like everybody else or do things like everybody else. God created you to be a unique individual, and He wants you to be free to be who He made you to be.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

You gotta keep trying to find your niche and trying to fit into whatever slot that’s left for you or to make one of your own.

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.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

Real life is the life that’s in you, not your circumstances, like where you live or what job you have or who you’re in relationship with.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

He who knows himself is enlightened.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

I don’t know that you can put a label on growth. I’m just me.

I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

Love is an interesting thing. Perhaps I’ve never been in love before – I don’t really know? I think I have. I guess it’s subjective in that way.

My lectures, based on Islamic teachings, were on various subjects. Some of the titles were, ‚The Intoxication of Life,‘ ‚The Purpose of Life,‘ ‚The Real Cause of Man’s Distress,‘ ‚The Journey to the Goal in Life,‘ and, one of my favorites, ‚The Heart of Man.‘ They contained important insights that spoke to something deep inside me.

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

Sometimes, I think if you get away from what you’re called to do, it’s more of a distraction.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.

I was becoming post-ideological.

Those of us who submitted or surrendered our ideas and dreams and identities to the ‚leaders‘ must take back our rights, our identities, our responsibilities.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

In the flush of love’s light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are, and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.

I created myself. I have taught myself so much.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

I had nothing growing up, but I always wanted to be ‚sexy,‘ even before I knew what the word was.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

You don’t sign up for a divorce when you get married. It’s very painful. But it’s taught me a great deal about myself.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

I want to challenge you today to get out of your comfort zone. You have so much incredible potential on the inside. God has put gifts and talents in you that you probably don’t know anything about.

I like touring extensively because I think the more hours you spend onstage, the more you know who you are onstage.

Everybody has a purpose.

Before finding music, I didn’t have too many aspirations. I wanted to hang out, make a little money from whatever I had to do.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

If you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful – that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience – every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.

It’s easy to forget who you are.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.

I don’t really know that much about love, it turns out.