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Self-discovery Quotes by Famous Authors

1. “Everyone is passionate about something. It’s your job to find out what it is.”

Guy Kawasaki

2. “To understand the world: read. To understand yourself: write.”

Ankur Warikoo

3. “Anger’s purpose is not to fix the unfulfilled need within you. It is simply to make you aware that there is an unfulfilled need within you.”

Ankur Warikoo

4. “It is better to be busy in the chase of finding yourself instead of being busy in the rat race and never know yourself.”

Ankur Warikoo

5. “Only when you go against the flow will you find your own flow.”

Ankur Warikoo

6. “I have come to realize that in every person there is something fine and pure and noble, along with a desire for self-fulfillment.”

Jimmy Carter

7. “The people I found, the people I was attracted to were not unlike myself. They were trying to find order in their world, looking for the centre.”

V.S. Naipaul

8. “After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.”

V.S. Naipaul

9. “We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.”

V.S. Naipaul

10. “One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.”

V.S. Naipaul

11. “A true partner or friend is one who encourages you to look deep inside yourself for the beauty and love you’ve been seeking.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

12. “The less I was of who I was, the better I felt.”

Leonard Cohen

13. “In an age where there is much talk about “being yourself” I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. Rather it seems to me that when one is too intent on “being himself” he runs the risk of impersonating a shadow.”

Thomas Merton

14. “A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.”

Thomas Merton

15. “The thing that crushed me was that I had never learned to dance.”

Thomas Merton

16. “If what most people take for granted were really true – if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now. If.”

Thomas Merton

17. “For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be.”

Thomas Merton

18. “Monastic prayer begins not so much with “considerations” as with a “return to the heart,” finding one’s deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being.”

Thomas Merton

19. “One has to be alone, under the sky, Before everything falls into place and one finds his or her own place in the midst of it all. We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature.”

Thomas Merton

20. “If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”

Thomas Merton

21. “The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.”

Thomas Merton

22. “There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.”

Thomas Merton

23. “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.”

Thomas Merton

24. “Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.”

Thomas Merton

25. “The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.”

Thomas Merton

26. “You are made in the image of what you desire.”

Thomas Merton

27. “We are warmed by the fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts.”

Thomas Merton

28. “If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts.”

Thomas Merton

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

Thomas Merton

30. “Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.”

Thomas Merton

31. “In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for ‘finding himself.’ If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.”

Thomas Merton

32. “We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.”

Thomas Merton

33. “I found a new me. When I first came over to America, it was like, ‘How can I be rich? How can I build my movie career? How can I become the most muscular man?’ It was all about me, and then there was this turn, and I found it was really great to do this.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger

34. “We are always stronger than we know.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger

35. “Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.”

Anton Chekhov

36. “The most terrifying thing in the world is to accept oneself completely.”

Anton Chekhov

37. “Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave’s blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being – not a slave’s – coursing through his veins.”

Anton Chekhov

38. “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”

Anton Chekhov

39. “Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you who you are.”

Anton Chekhov

40. “I’m the seagull. No, that’s not it. I’m an actress. That’s it.”

Anton Chekhov

41. “When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.”

Daniel J. Boorstin

42. “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

Tara Brach

43. “The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience.”

Tara Brach

44. “The spiritual path is not a solo endeavor. In fact, the very notion of a self who is trying to free her/ himself is a delusion. We are in it together and the company of spiritual friends helps us realize our interconnectedness.”

Tara Brach

45. “Meditation is evolution’s strategy to bring out our full potential.”

Tara Brach

46. “When we get lost we need only pause, look at what is true, relax our heart and arrive again.”

Tara Brach

47. “Suffering is our call to attention, our call to investigate the truth of our beliefs.”

Tara Brach

48. “The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.”

Tara Brach

49. “When I was first introduced to Buddhism in a high school World Studies class, I dismissed it out of hand. This was during the hedonistic days of the late '60s, and this spiritual path seemed so grim with its concern about attachment and, apparently, anti-pleasure.”

Tara Brach