Quotes on Self Discovery

Each man's life represents a road toward himself.

What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

Something in me knows where I’m going, and - well, painting is a state of being. ... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

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.

If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

Mistakes are a part of the dues one pays for a full life.

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

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.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity, and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall-that of our consciousness-between the world and ourselves.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.