self-discovery quotes

We have the tendency to run away from suffering and to look for happiness. But, in fact, if you have not suffered, you have no chance to experience real happiness.

The true identity theft is not financial. It’s not in cyberspace. It’s spiritual. It’s been taken.

Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet.

Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

I’ve never been a boyfriend kind of girl.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

I’m not lesbian; I’m not bisexual; I’m not straight. I’m just curious.

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.

What’s really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do – the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.

Let my skin and sinews and bones dry up, together with all the flesh and blood of my body! I welcome it! But I will not move from this spot until I have attained the supreme and final wisdom.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

I want you to be everything that’s you, deep at the center of your being.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.