self-discovery quotes

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

You can have the platinum album. But, you know, when you still feel like you haven’t quite found your place in the world, it kind of gives a crazy offset.

I love my friends and my past, and it’s made me who I am.

When you are young you tend to do so many things that are not needed. When you get experience, you know what exactly what works for you and you tend to do things that you want.

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.

It has been hard for me to find it, but I have found love.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

Real riches are the riches possessed inside.

It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

I learned, when I look in the mirror and tell my story, that I should be myself and not peep whatever everybody is doing.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

The more I grow in popularity, the lonelier it gets. Because you don’t really know me. You just know this part of me. You fell in love with that. But it’s way more intricate than what meets the surface.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

It’s the journey of self, I guess. You start with this kind of loner, outside guy, which a lot of people can relate to, and he goes out into the world.

I want to be just a pure spiritual leader.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

I’m just trying to be myself. I’m not trying to be anyone else.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.

It’s an endless proving of myself, that I really am a musician, that I have something to offer in the room. That women can be musicians, women can be rock stars, women can be more than an objectified idea of a pop star.

They would not find me changed from him they knew – only more sure of all I thought was true.

This has always been my life and no one else’s, and that’s how it’s always been since the day I came in it.

You have to be someone.

I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

I’m here to spread a message of hope. Follow your heart. Don’t follow what you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.

The things that transfixed you as a child, that you found most exciting was not a passing fancy, but a message about what you’re supposed to do.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

Me, as a person, I grow. I’m like a chameleon. You know? That is a gift and a curse for me. But more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box.

The world around me has changed, and I have learned to adapt but not change. But I’m changing into the woman I am meant to be.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.

I’ve just tried to grow up in the most natural and gradual process that I possibly can and make choices I feel are right for me and my fans.

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

The most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, is, to let him show himself what he is and steal out of your company.

The formation of one’s character ought to be everyone’s chief aim.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

Many people have an intense feeling about what they’re best at. Too often, they’re driven away from it by other people.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

My life is real.

I think the worst part about a breakup sometimes, if one could choose a worst part, would possibly be if you get out of a relationship, and you don’t recognize yourself because you changed a lot about you.

I always try to be myself. Ever since I was an introverted kid, I’d get on stage and be able to break out of my shell.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

I wanted to imbue Ziggy with real flesh and blood and muscle, and it was imperative that I find Ziggy and be him.

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one’s nature. Have fun with it and you know, is to accept everything about ourselves.

I’m not who people expect me to be. I’m not Henry Kissinger.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

I’ve experienced great things, I’ve experienced great tragedies. I’ve done almost everything I could possibly ever imagine doing, but I just know that there’s more.

The single most powerful thing I can be is to be myself.