Finding Oneself Quotes

If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him. ~ Criss Jami

We can be walking around in this world, with bits and pieces of our souls scattered in different time loops and space cracks. You feel like you are always looking for yourself, because you actually are always looking for yourself! You're always looking for those bits and pieces of you. You've got to sit down and remember where you left them at. You've got to quiet the noise and go back to those loops in time and cracks in space that you forgot about and you need to understand yourself in those moments, and embrace yourself. And maybe even embrace those who were around you, with you. That's how you get those pieces back, that's how you sew them back into you. ~ C. JoyBell C.

We all make mistakes. We must keep finding the right paths. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

An Indigo Bunting let out a trill, a cheery song, reminding me of better days, of hope and happiness and all the lofty promises a blue canary can sing about. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of the heady morning air. Looking within myself, I searched for the man I once was. ~ Cheryl R Cowtan

As love leads the way, the steps will be made easy. ~ David Scott

How everyone is struggling for something. Trying to keep the balance.

Struggling to find their way back. Doing the best they can with what they've been dealt. Staying in place, doing anything to keep from sinking. To keep from rising.

Until something changes. Like a day at school, a friend for lunch, someone standing up for you.

And the choice to feel. Standing before you.

Realizing what part is yours. What you can and can't do. Who you are. Who you are meant to be.

More than the sum of all your broken parts. ~ Ash Parsons

The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for
the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the
sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago.
She thinks she remembers listening to her own life
break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor
window on the east side of Chicago, or as she
climbs back up to claim herself again. ~ Joy Harjo

Reach deep within, and reconnect with the essence of your being. ~ Bryant McGill

I used to play a game where I imagined that someone had abandoned me in a strange place & I had to find my way back home-I thought I could do it blind, the same way a lost dog might trek a thousand miles to return to its owner, relying on some mysterious instinct that drew the heart back to where it belonged. ~ Laura McHugh

We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart - the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong. ~ Carson McCullers

You must find yourself before you can know where you belong, yet to find yourself first you must know who you are. However, you will never really know who you are if you are always allowing other people to define who you should be, so be yourself and if you are still unsure of who you are then reinvent yourself. ~ Andrew James Pritchard

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
this brokenness inside me might start healing.
Out here its like I'm someone else,
I thought that maybe I could find myself
if I could just come in I swear I'll leave.
Won't take nothing but a memory
from the house that built me. ~ Miranda Lambert

Stop trying to find yourself. You've had it all along.
Never feel ashamed for feeling different; different is the new normal. ~ Joel Annesley

He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It's the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between oneself and something that is profoundly different from oneself: a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web ... ~ David Abram

But there is a difference between enjoying someone's company, thinking them attractive, and finding oneself helplessly in love. ~ Kate Morton

It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one's treasure will not win one anyone's favours; one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone's camp ... Beauty is the word that shall be our first. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Those who seek eternity find a mind of infinity ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

He'd thought he was lost, but now he recognized that eternity was around him, like salt from a shaker or stars in the sky. ~ Alice Hoffman

You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons ... This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence. ~ Arthur Koestler

The greatest discovery in life is finding oneself. ~ M.K. Shivakoti

I saw a dead bird flying through a broken sky. I heard it, and it said, The world will never understand. ~ Nadege Richards

Me personally, I'm a guy who it took a long time to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. I relate to a lot of that finding oneself a little later in the game, or being thrown a curve later in the game. ~ Kurt Sutter

Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all. ~ Rollo May

The feeling of losing oneself in somebody's arms, yet at the same time finding oneself there, is irreplaceable. Nothing compares to the intensity of that feeling. ~ Katarina Witt

Don't you understand, Crow? You're the one worth finding" -Osh ~ Lauren Wolk

She never indulged in reveries or tried to be clever in her conversation; she seemed to have drawn a line in her mind beyond which she never went. It was quite obvious that feelings, every kind of relationship, including love, entered into her life on equal terms with everything else, while in the case of other women love quite manifestly takes part, if not in deeds, then in words, in all the problems of life, and everything else is allowed in only in so far as love leaves room for it. The thing this woman esteemed most was the art of living, of being able to control oneself, of keeping a balance between thought and intention, intention and realization. You could never take her unawares, by surprise, but she was like a watchful enemy whose expectant gaze would always be fixed on you, however hard you tried to lie in wait for him. High society was her element, and therefore tact and caution prompted her every thought, word, and movement. ~ Ivan Goncharov

I think, to its credit, this is one of the last forms of popular entertainment that I don't sense to be discriminatory in any way. I think there's this general hunger for greater diversity, where publishers are really excited about finding different voices than what has been done. ~ Adrian Tomine

Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time. ~ Alan Watts

And when I am finished for the day I go on great binges of information, skittering from one tidbit to the next, reading in quick gulps. At once, I've downloaded six episodes of Mad Men and tweeted a review from The Millions and updated my status and liked and commented and shared. It's as if, having checked temporarily out of the great rush to witness and represent oneself online, and having spent instead a number of hours in the thick of imagination and the summer heat of my living room, I now have to scramble back into that perpetual heaving of information lest I disappear, irrelevant. ~ Anonymous

How can one learn to know oneself? Never by introspection, rather by action. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It's the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language. ~ Joshua Foer

Greece is not a country that can be humiliated. It is a matter of finding an intersection between the reasonable elements of both sides [EU and Greece] which has to be done. ~ Jean-Claude Juncker

Not all who hesitate are lost. ~ Joseph Campbell

The place one's in, though, doesn't make any contribution to peace of mind: it's the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself. ~ Seneca The Younger

I would say that I'm finding my voice in more ways than one. ~ Boz Scaggs

Do not place hope in finding a secret technique. Polish the mind through ceaseless training; that is the key to effective techniques. ~ Kyuzo Mifune

The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. ~ Terence McKenna

I just feel like, for whatever reason, female playwrights don't really ask me to do their plays. Nothing would make me happier than finding the sisterhood, but I can't make them. ~ Anna D. Shapiro

When you become angry, you enter a tunnel, leaving the light behind you; when you get calm, you exit the tunnel, finding the light in front of you! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were ... It happened bit by bit, until ... you're doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand
the people you hated when you were ten. ~ John Lennon

No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself. ~ Louis L'Amour

And then one day when you're playing your little game you'll suddenly find yourself pinned down like a butterfly. ~ Ian Fleming

My thesis in terms of all my art is finding the beauty in the ugly truth. Just find the beauty in realism and what's there. ~ Nikki Jean

Take yourself in. Ask the questions no one ever asked you. Keep going until you know the answer and you know who's asking. Until you realize- it's not far away- that the essence of you, like the sky, was always here. You just happened to get distracted by the local weather for a few decades. ~ Geneen Roth

The guitar, by its very nature, the nature of its sound, by the soft nuance of its powerful and ancient voice, by the magic of the tone, goes directly to the part of oneself where love is felt. When I hear the sound of the guitar, it goes to some part inside of me that opens the door that holds feelings of love and everything that is beautiful which lives inside of me. ~ Pepe Romero

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect). ~ Mark Twain

Finding information is either a software question or a question of how much information is online. ~ Bill Gates

Did you ever wake up with an erection ... and find yourself in a massage chair at Brookstone? And you yell to the sales clerk "I'll take it!" ~ Zach Galifianakis

Life is difficult. Not just for me or other ALS patients. Life is difficult for everyone. Finding ways to make life meaningful and purposeful and rewarding, doing the activities that you love and spending time with the people that you love - I think that's the meaning of this human experience. ~ Steve Gleason

His hand came out and captured her by the chin. She froze, finding it hard to breathe as he gently raised her face to meet his gaze. ~ Lia Davis

Yeah, my parents are crappy, but you hurt either of my sisters and I will spend my life finding ways to destroy you. ~ Patrick Ness

To love others you've got to love yourself, but I love myself too much I've got no place for others. ~ Ahmed Mostafa

Driving home to Iowa from Marion, Indiana, I went through Chicago, sure, but it was far easier to find a field than a town. Far easier to find empty spaces than people. Even in my town, Cedar Rapids, the second-largest city in Iowa, you are never more than minutes from a cornfield. It's a bigness that can feel limiting if you are the only one of you that you see. But the internet is an equalizer - bringing together voices that once felt alone, realigning boundaries, creating spaces where there were none before.

There is a danger too of creating ideological bubbles. Of filtering out dissent. It's a criticism that was leveled heavily against blue states after the 2016 election. But when you are in the minority - the voice that is silenced - you are never in a bubble, even if you try. And finding a place where you don't have to fight for acceptance, where you can just be accepted, even if that is online is the difference between pain and hope. ~ Lyz Lenz

Encountering rhyme out of the blue is like finding a long-lost twin (fraternal), or a suitcase that closes with a particularly satisfying click. ~ Matthea Harvey

It's not about finding ways to avoid God's judgment and feeling like a failure if you don't do everything perfectly. It's about fully experiencing God's love and letting it perfect you. It's not about being somebody you are not. It's about becoming who you really are. ~ Stormie O'martian

One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself. ~ J.G. Ballard

In art one is usually totally alone with oneself. ~ Paula Modersohn-Becker

We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.

The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying 'OH NO YOU DON'T COCK-CHEEK'. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

She won't ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus).

She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm).

And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.

I will stop finding her hairs.


I will stop hearing her breathing. ~ Max Porter

Writing enables a person to build a protective barrier shielding them from an adverse environment, scrutinize their circumstances, and discover how to employ new perceptions to center oneself in a world filled with strife, conflict, violence, affection, beauty, splendor. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

You never find yourself until you face the truth. ~ Pearl Bailey

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them
the one, in fact, which is not a mask. ~ W. H. Auden

The surest way to damage society is to call for a "great man" to lead it. The surest way to improve society is to become a great man to lead oneself and convince others to do likewise. ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. ~ John Cage

The unmerited dislike of another made one think less of oneself. We are enlarged by the love of others; we are diminished by their dislike. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Something in her was changing as she read the books. Life after life flashed before her eyes, yet she stayed safe from misery. And the urge to act things out onstage could be satisfied cheaply, and at home, and without the annoyance of other members of an acting company. Her ambition to leave faded and a kind of contentment set in. She hadn't exactly feared the word contentment, but had always associated it with a vague sense of failure. To be discontented had always seemed much richer a thing. To be restless, striving. That view was romantic. In truth, she was finding out, life was better lived in a tranquil pattern. As long as she could read, she never tired of the design of her days. ~ Louise Erdrich

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil - everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self - your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching lo ~ Tim O'Brien

I have to resist the temptation to want to learn everything. You know, you can't. You have to restrict yourself at some time, or else you find yourself just being spread too thin. And already I think I try too many things. ~ Pete Seeger

I know I'm going to have to get beyond being George H.W. Bush's son and Barbara's son
for which I'm really proud. And I'm going to get beyond being George W.'s brother for which I am extraordinarily proud as well, there's a lot of interest in finding the ways that we are different and all this. Well, the simple fact is that we're all on our own life's journey
my brothers and sister are different than me. ~ Jeb Bush

We live in an industrial world with a globalized capitalist economy organized politically around nation-states. Finding a willing audience for even a mild critique of any of these foundational systems is not easy; suggesting that all three systems should be rethought in fundamental ways seems crazy. ~ Robert Jensen

One cannot know oneself, what one actually is except in relationship. Anger, jealousy, envy, lust - all such reactions exist only in one's relationship with people, with things, and with ideas. If there is no relationship at all, if there is complete isolation, one cannot know oneself. The mind can isolate itself, thinking that it is somebody, which is a state of lunacy, unbalance, and in that state it cannot know itself. It merely has ideas about itself, like the idealist who is isolating himself from the fact of what he is by pursuing what he should be. That is what most of us are doing. Because relationship is painful, we want to isolate ourselves from this pain, and in the isolating process we create the ideal of what we should be, which is imaginary, an invention of the mind. So we can know ourselves as we actually are, consciously as well as unconsciously, only in relationship, and that is fairly obvious. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Conviction, as Michelstaedter wrote, is the present possession of one's own life and one's own person, the ability to live each moment to the full, not goading oneself madly into burning it up fast and using it with a view to an all too imminent future, thus destroying it in the hope that life
the whole of life
may pass swiftly. ~ Claudio Magris

You are not allowed to get lost unless I want to lose you. You aren't allowed to be found, unless it's me doing the finding. And the only way you're allowed to die is if I choose to kill you with my own hands. Your life doesn't belong to you anymore, and if I have to murder you tonight and paint the snow with your blood to make you understand that, I will. You are mine, Kingsley. End of discussion. ~ Tiffany Reisz