Quotes that suit my fancy.
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,
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
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 your current location isn't that place but, Hallelujah, that unsettled, uneasy feeling of lost-ness just brought you closer to it. ~Erika HarrisAll men should strive
to learn before they die
what they are running from, and to, and why.
~James Thurber
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. ~George Moore
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 BurgessIf 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 Zaiba
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. ~G.K. ChestertonTo the question of your life you are the answer, and to the problems of your life you are the solution. ~Joe Cordare
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. ~Henry David Thoreau
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,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
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. ~Alan WattsOh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves. ~William Shakespeare
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 FadimanIt'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
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece. ~William ShakespeareI may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. ~Douglas Adams
We run away all the time to avoid coming face to face with ourselves. ~
Author Unknown Zaiba
The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want. ~Ben Stein
Driving down the wrong road and knowing it,
The fork years behind, how many have thought
To pull up on the shoulder and leave the car
Empty, strike out across the fields; and how many
Are still mazed among dock and thistle,
Seeking the road they should have taken?
~Damon Knight, The Man in the Tree, 1984We catch frightful glimpses of ourselves in the hostile eyes of others. ~Mignon McLaughlin
It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself. Makes you wonder what else you can do that you've forgotten about. ~Alan Ball
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
Your distress about life might mean you have been living for the wrong reason, not that you have no reason for living. ~Tom O'ConnorA man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything. ~Samuel Johnson
A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
"Know thyself" - a maxim as pernicious as it is odious. A person observing himself would arrest his own development. Any caterpillar who tried to "know himself" would never become a butterfly. ~André Gide
When your heart speaks, take good notes. ~Judith Campbell
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
The truth is that it is natural, as well as necessary, for every man to be a vagabond occasionally. ~Samuel H. Hammond
There are people who live their whole lives on the default settings, never realizing you can customize. ~Robert Brault