Quotes about Self-discovery

I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one, be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead.

Not till we are completely lost or turned around, do we begin to find ourselves.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?

Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be expert in home-cosmography.

A voice said to him—Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.—But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.

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

One trend I see is the rejection of growth for self-discovery and the pursuit of authentic community. So we keep whittling our spiritual community to a smaller and smaller and more exclusive inner circle. The problem is if the diagnoses are wrong, so will be the cure.

The first step to becoming what God made you to be is to stop worrying about what others want you to be.

Sometimes I need to be a stranger to myself. Only then my soul can show me not what I want, but what I need to see.

Your life is a mirror. Life gives us not what we want. Life gives us who we are.

In truth, to know oneself seems to be the hardest of all things. Not only our eye, which observes external objects, does not use the sense of sight upon itself, but even our mind, which contemplates intently another's sin, is slow in the recognition of its own defects.

The spiritual life is a reaching out to our innermost self, to our fellow human and to our God.