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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, Personal Conduct, The Second Sin, 1973

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.
What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.
~ Alan Alda

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.
~ Elizabeth Bibesco, Haven, 1951

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
~ Dr. Alexis Carrel

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
~ Anaïs Nin

The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose.
~ Richard Grant

All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
~ James Thurber

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
~ Michel de Montaigne

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 Burgess

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, he wants to reestablish them.
Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.
~ Amiel, Journal, 1884

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
~ Muhammad Ali

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
~ Wallace Stevens

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
~ G.K. Chesterton, The Logic of Elfland, Orthodoxy, 1908

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.
~ Carol Shields

To the question of your life you are the answer, and to the problems of your life you are the solution.
~ Joe Cordare

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
~ Alice Walker

Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.
~ Timothy Leary

Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
~ Matthew Arnold, Self-Dependence, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems, 1852

No one remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
~ Thomas Mann

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

He who knows others is learned; He who knows himself is wise.
~ Lao-tzu, Tao te Ching

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
~ James A. Froude

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
~ Alan Watts

We are the products of editing, rather than authorship.
~ George Wald, The Origin of Optical Activity, Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 1975

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.
Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.
This is a kind of death.
~ Anaïs Nin

It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.
~ Lucille Ball

It'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, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

When you reread a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before.
You see more in you than there was before.
~ Clifton Fadiman

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

For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
~ Clifton Fadiman