Personal Discovery Quotes & Sayings

We each act as the creator of the self, and therefore, we strive to attain self-realization by understanding what we were in various stages of life including what we began as and what we transmuted into becoming. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The world to him no longer seemed a math equation but rather a complex piece of art, a masterpiece of things not easily understood. — K. Martin Beckner

It is understandable why a person might shirk a brutal self-assessment until the unforgiving talons of a reckless life rips their thin skin covertures into shreds leaving a person ensnared in their destructive thoughts and lacerated with bolts of self-incrimination. — Kilroy J. Oldster

We must live a genuine life in order to discover personal happiness and self-fulfillment. Understanding that a person is living a lie is the first step into realizing what is possible. No matter how frightful such a proposition is, we must dare to be an original self. — Kilroy J. Oldster

If you walk 100 miles into the life you don't want. Often, you must walk those same 100 miles to get out of that life. This is the answer to why the journey to fulfillment is often so difficult. However, if you can find a shortcut, a new path, you can get to the life you want much quicker. This is the premise of personal development, self-improvement and self-discovery..! — James A. Murphy

The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.

I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go. — Laurie Perez

Personal destiny is discovered through teachings — Sunday Adelaja

There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That's the end. That's when the coffin is closed. You might be deteriorating physically in the long process of aging, but your personal process of daily discovery is ongoing. You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day. — Bruce Lee

There are times in every person's life when they feel lonely, isolated, like maybe they don't belong. For adoptees, this is often exacerbated by the circumstances. Because you were given up, you have a built-in scapegoat; you can blame everything that you feel on the fact that you were adopted. But, I want you to know that this is a fallacy. Finding your biological parents will not fill in the void that you feel. You will get answers to your questions, but no one can fill in the missing pieces except for you. Before you go on a search, take the time to get to know yourself very well. Heal the hurts you've experienced. Acknowledge the past and how it has affected you. Become a whole person who is seeking roots, not a damaged person who is seeking fulfillment. — Janet Louise Stephenson

Humankind's amazing grace is the ability to choose right from wrong, and assume personal responsibility for our conduct. With the judicious exercise of composure and appliance of self-discipline, we exceed our humble origins and blossom into a final rendering of whatever type of person we aspire to become. — Kilroy J. Oldster

But I'm not running away. I'm running toward... toward adventure, toward discovery, toward diversity. And while I was in Mexico I discovered something intruiging: Once I leave the U.S., I am not bound by the rules of my culture. And when I am a foreigner in another country, I am exempt from the local rules. This extraordinary situation means that there are no rules in my life. I am free to live by the standards and ideals and rules I create for myself. — Rita Golden Gelman

What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation. — Adyashanti

A man who reads will find himself. — Lailah Gifty Akita

A big part of what I wanted to do with this character was go from when I was a boy and try and develop into a man, really try and play him as a man who is on this search, on a journey of personal, spiritual, political, social discovery. — Orlando Bloom

These are often the children of overbearing narcissistic parents who cannot tolerate the teenager's growing need for separateness and threaten the child with psychological or actual abandonment as a punishment for exercising independence. The child considers the risks and decides prematurely to do what is expected, becoming a doctor. . .without first engaging in a journey of self-discovery. When the parents' or culture's roles and values are adopted wholesale and without examination, the process of establishing a personal identity is short-circuited. Some of these individuals rework this struggle more successfully later in life, while others are never free from the narcissistic web and only feel good when they are pleasing someone other than themselves. — Sandy Hotchkiss

To live a life of heaven on earth is a personal discovery — Sunday Adelaja

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. — W.E.B. Du Bois

The secret of concentration is the secret of self-discovery. You reach inside yourself to discover your personal resources, and what it takes to match them to the challenge. — Arnold Palmer

A doctrine like that of the Trinity tells us that the very life of God is a yielding or giving-over into the life of an Other, a 'negation' in the sense of refusing to settle for the idea that normative life or personal identity is to be conceived in terms of self-enclosed and self-sufficient units. The negative is associated with the 'ek-static', the discovery of identity in self-transcending relation. And accordingly, theology itself has to speak in a mode that encourages us to question ourselves, to deny ourselves, in the sense of denying systems and concepts that are the comfortable possession of individual minds. — Rowan Williams

Einstein's discovery of special relativity involved an intuition based on a decade of intellectual as well as personal experiences.9 The most important and obvious, I think, was his deep understanding and knowledge of theoretical physics. He was also helped by his ability to visualize thought experiments, which had been encouraged by his education in Aarau. Also, there was his grounding in philosophy: from Hume and Mach he had developed a skepticism about things that could not be observed. And this skepticism was enhanced by his innate rebellious tendency to question authority. — Walter Isaacson

The indescribable pleasure - which pales the rest of life's joys - is abundant compensation for the investigator who endures the painful and persevering analytical work that precedes the appearance of the new truth, like the pain of childbirth. It is true to say that nothing for the scientific scholar is comparable to the things that he has discovered. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an investigator willing to exchange the paternity of a scientific conquest for all the gold on earth. And if there are some who look to science as a way of acquiring gold instead of applause from the learned, and the personal satisfaction associated with the very act of discovery, they have chosen the wrong profession. — Santiago Ramon Y Cajal

Of course you have passions and talents. Of course you have some purpose in the world. Your emotions are guiding you towards it. Each time you discover something that you like or something that you hate, you discover yourself. Everyone can do this. If you didn't like some things more than others, you'd be living in a sewer eating grass. More often than not, it's those things you think are too weird, too personal, or too imperfect that you must share. The world does not await your perfection. It awaits your courage and your honesty. Let yourself be seen. — Vironika Tugaleva

Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him. — Wolfgang Pauli

Time stretches and calms, but still we reach, for we belonged then. We want to know. Sometimes that knowledge is painful, or inconvenient, or even damning. But it is essential. It exposes us for what we have been, and can be. — Mark Mustian

The evil components of our shadow are the part of us that we deplore, the part of us that we prefer not to admit. One must set themselves free from all inhibitions in order to initiate close encounters with their innermost monster. By standing toe-to-toe with the part of ourselves that we most detest, a person is in a position to slay their fiendish sense of self and, by doing so, undergo a soulful transformation. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Look at the people who you surround yourself with. Who your friends are and who they are because they are a reflection of you. Your experiences in life define who you are, and everything else that makes you, you; shapes you into the person you are meant to be. Self discovery can last a lifetime because we are continually growing and changing as human beings. You are the person you've become today for a reason. So, ask yourself why. What brought you to the person you are now? Paint yourself a picture of who you once were, and who you now are to see how much you've changed, and, maybe, you'll discover something valuable to who you truly are. — Auliq Ice

After His resurrection, Jesus asked Peter this personal and probing question: "Do you love Me more than these?" (John 21:15). Many have speculated as to what Jesus meant by the word "these," but it's probably better that we don't know. It allows each of us to personalize the question and ask ourselves, "What do I love more than Jesus? — Discovery House Publishers

The greatest self are self-improvement, self-development and self-discovery. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else's snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet being all-connected: this is not writing. It's world-creating.

It's raw, exposed dreaming. It's humbling. At first too personal and intimate to share, it evolves like a child into a life of its own until I have no say in what comes next.

It's what I wake at 4am to say Yes to, the spinning possibility of a new story relentlessly commanding me to write it down so it can whirl in your experience. — Laurie Perez

It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear. — Harlan Ellison

Strength is a capacity for endurance. One of the dividends of suffering is the universal discovery the we posses a strength within us we never knew we had. Navigating through a difficult episode not only shows us that inner strength is there but convinces us it will always be there to serve us in the future. Overcoming gives us an assurance of personal confidence and value that far exceeds what we thought we possessed before our struggles began. — Dennis Wholey

That's what coming face-to-face with six months in the woods will do to you: as soon as you realize you have the chance to be a different person, you become one. You can forget who you are. This is no accident when you've spent miles wondering, with every labored step, Who is this person who has decided to try this?--wondering who you are. You have nothing but time to answer the question, to give a new account of yourself. Your only witness might be a blanket of cool moss on a sunny day, or a panorama of endless mountains, or a young doe gazing by the Trail. You've yet to discover that the journey is the destination. So you lose yourself, then you find yourself again, farther along. — Winton Porter

A leader isn't born after 9 months' conception. When talents are discovered, skills are mastered & values are developed, a leader is born. — Israelmore Ayivor

You are a bundle of mysteries. Finding and conquering yourself is a lifetime task. There are unplumbed depths in you full of the rich ore of personal discovery. Explore yourself! There is power in you - the power to change yourself and to change the world; the power to create plans, projects, movements for the common good; the power to inspire and serve. — Wilferd Peterson

But the reality of being American requires that a commitment to our founding principles must be renewed by personal discovery with each generation - actively, not passively - if the country is to remain true to its stated goals. — Adrian Brooks

Writing a memoir is a holistic method of learning and healing by placing responsibility for personal transformation on the spiritual authority of the self. Writing a person's life story is useful to gain a comprehensive understanding regarding a person's maturation, distinctive stages of personal development, and the influences provided by their family and society. The writing processes also serves as a catharsis for painful personal events that a person seeks to integrate into their transmuting being. Writing our personal story, we discover new dimensions of our being. — Kilroy J. Oldster

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent. — Hugo Hamilton

Your inner strength is your outer foundation — Allan Rufus

Without being aware, I think I was being indoctrinated into what was called Vitalism, the idea that what makes life worth living, the good life, consists of accepting challenges, solving problems, discovery, personal growth, personal change. — Edmund Phelps

In my personal view, a failure to discover unimagined objects and answer unasked questions, once HST functions properly, would indicate a lack of imagination in stocking the Universe on the part of the Deity. — John N. Bahcall

It is only when you take responsibility for your life that you discover how powerful you truly are — Allanah Hunt

I sometimes marvel at how far I've come - blissful, even, in the knowledge that I am slowly becoming a well-evolved human being - only to have the illusion shattered by an episode of bad behaviour that contradicts the new and reinforces the old. At these junctures of self-reflection, I ask the question: "are all my years of hard work unraveling before my eyes, or am I just having an episode?" For the sake of personal growth and the pursuit of equanimity, I choose the latter and accept that, on this journey of evolution, I may not encounter just one bad day, but a group of many. — B.G. Bowers

The real importance of automatism lay in the fact that it led to a different relation between the artist and the creative act. Where the artist had traditionally been seen as someone who invents a personal world, bringing into being something unique to his own 'genius', the surrealists conceived themselves as explorers and researchers rather than 'artist' in the traditional sense and it was discovery rather than invention that became crucial for them. — Michael Richardson

'Secrets Of The Millionaire Mind' was born out of my own journey of self-discovery within both my personal and professional life. — T. Harv Eker

My book, Ambassador Book one: how to take on the world and win will help to illuminate many of the obstacles that we all must face in order to succeed. You are invited on a journey of personal discovery. — Ken Taylor

If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs. We will get the very rich, who contract out the messy things in life the very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show and the very devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their discovery. — Charles Krauthammer

I know what I want. I will pursue it with all heart. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Does the use of the word "revelation" mean that reason has been left behind? Obviously not. Both the discovery by Kepler of a new pattern in the movement of the heavenly bodies and the disclosure to Moses of a personal calling become the starting point of a tradition of reasoning in which the significance of these disclosures is explored, developed, tested against new experience, and extended into further areas of thought. — Lesslie Newbigin

Learning to navigate the unpredictable terrain of life is an essential skill to develop. We can't live a happy life if we are unwilling to pave the path that will lead to our personal fulfillment and destiny. Learning to sit comfortably in the seat of uncertainty is challenging, but equally rewarding, because discovery is what waits just underneath the surface of that uncertainty and that gives us the chance to become fearless explorers, of our own lives. — Jaeda DeWalt

Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important, but because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one's role in society, and the relation between the two. — Alan Hirsch

Self discovery doesn't not seek to bring you answers about your personal life or philosophically comfort you about life and death. What it does is bring you into reality as perception itself. — Frederick Lenz

See the sun with your own eyes; feel the earth with your own hands. — Marty Rubin

Understanding your strengths and weaknesses is an unending process of self-discovery and creative evolution. Real success depends on being true to what fascinates you. — Paul O'Brien

Anxiety, and the physical symptoms it causes, is merely fog along the path of independence and discovery. — Charles F. Glassman

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

One of the most liberating personal discoveries I have made is the knowledge that whenever I am upset, there is another way of looking at any situation, person, or condition. — Lee L Jampolsky

I made my personal discovery of Emily Carr while visiting Victoria in 1981 to write a travel article. Immediately, her strong colors attracted me; her spunk fascinated me. Her down-to-earth voice in her writing appealed to me as authentic and original. — Susan Vreeland

America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way. — Ayn Rand

The starting point of enlightenment, a goal that every person should strive for, is inner leadership. Leadership is far more than something businesspeople do at work. Leadership is all about personal responsibility, self-discovery, and creating value in the world by the people we become. Too many people spend their time blaming others for all that isn't working in their lives. We blame our spouses for our unhappy home lives; we blame our bosses for our distress at work; we blame strangers on the freeway for making us angry; we blame our parents for keeping us small. Blame, blame, blame, blame. But blaming others is nothing more than excusing yourself. Blaming others for the current quality of your life is a sad way to live. In doing so, all you're doing is playing the victim. — Robin S. Sharma

Humankind is an instinctive creature that is capable of feelings and rational thoughts, which accounts for why such a rich diversity exists amongst human nature. A person's unique personality is simply a crystallization of particular aspects of human nature. Freedom of thought and expression ensures that no person replicates another person's exact persona. Every person is a creature of predicable needs and impulses, infused with the poetry of multifaceted feelings, and ruled by a scientifically calculated instrument capable of precision of thought. — Kilroy J. Oldster

In discovery- driven planning, learning is the essential unit of progress. A course correction isn't equivalent to failure, it's an opportunity to re-calibrate so you can move more quickly up the learning curve. — Whitney Johnson

It is not how many times we get lost, but how many times we seek the path, again and again, that determines our level of consciousness. — Vironika Tugaleva

To discover a metaphysical relationship between Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular. And very unimportant. If that were all this Chautauqua was about I should be dismissed. What's important is the relevance of such a discovery to all the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us in them. — Robert M. Pirsig

Self-knowledge is the greatest education. — Lailah Gifty Akita

My fellow citizens, the American Presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery. — Sarah Palin

I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me. — Shel Silverstein

This world of sense, built by the imagination
how fair and foul it is! Like a fairy island in the sea of life, it smiles in sunlight and sleeps in green, known of the world not by communion of knowledge, but by personal, secret discovery! — J.G. Holland

Make sure your subconscious knows you love it by stroking it until it purrs. — Teresa Sue McAdams

I thought I pretty much knew Johnny Cash's life. But one of my personal discoveries was how little we know about any of these people. — Robert Hilburn

It is our own pain, and our own desire to be free of it, that alerts us to the suffering of the world. It is our personal discovery that pain can be acknowledged, even held lovingly, that enables us to look at the pain around us unflinchingly and feel compassion being born in us. We need to start with ourselves. — Sylvia Boorstein

I might never have realized who I really was or have gotten answers to the relentless questions that had driven me to the Cove without those quiet hours spent with Fairlight in the mountains. I do not know why it is that an intimate contact with wildlife and a personal observation of nature helps so much in this self-discovery. But that it is so, I have seen in other people's lives as well as my own ... even a few bricks and macadam are a shield between us and the wisdom that nature has to give. — Catherine Marshall

Less and less is life animated through personal discovery, intimacy with others, or self-reflection. While life has become more manageable for many people, it has become commensurately less engaged. — Kirk J. Schneider

When writing a comprehensive self-investigatory scroll, the writer attempts to weave a network of strands capable of enmeshing all sizes of ideas including those with no obvious interconnection. The writer must also trace all lingering thoughts to their original source in personal experiences, and revaluate each exquisite nuance notched into a person's conscious mind including acts of depravity, violence, and the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace. — Kilroy J. Oldster

We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The human mind wants to know more than it should, but it should not be told, personal discovery is the best and sometimes the only way. — Joao Matos

Personal enlightenment within an individual is a beautiful and often shocking process. We are shocked when we see the shadows for the first time and realise these things are in us! But it is only when there is light that there can be shadows and when we see our own shadows, this is evidence of the light! Rejoice in the discovery of your own shortcomings! They are the evidences of the shining sun! And as you turn towards the sun, the shadows will be behind you. — C. JoyBell C.

Now, what's stirring in this murky sea of complexity and foolishness is an almost suffocating need to breathe fresh history. — Laurie Perez

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery.
Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream. — Anais Nin

You'd be surprised how often you doubt your own sanity when you don't understand your own capacities. — K.M. Mac Aulay "Black Anna"

How strange, this habit of weeping. Do animals weep? Surely they feel sadness - but do they express it with tears? He doubts it. He has never heard of a weeping cat or dog, or of a weeping wild animal. It seems to be a uniquely human trait. He doesn't see what purpose it serves. He weeps hard, even violently, and at the end of it, what? Desolate tiredness. A handkerchief soaked in tears and mucus. Red eyes for everyone to notice. And weeping is undignified. It lies beyond the tutorials of etiquette and remains a personal idiom, individual in its expression. The twist of face, quantity of tears, quality of sob, pitch of voice, volume of clamour, effect on the complexion, the play of hands, the posture taken: One discovers weeping - one's weeping personality - only upon weeping. It is a strange discovery, not only to others but to oneself. Resolve — Yann Martel

It's called "being an artist" for a reason; it's something YOU ARE. It's how you live. It's WHO you are. How you spend your life and what you leave behind. — Charlotte Eriksson

GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT LANGUAGE Highly readable, witty, and provocative is Roger Brown's Words and Things. Also readable, magnificent, though sometimes too dogmatic, is Eric H. Lenneberg's Biological Foundations of Language. The deepest and most beautiful explorations of all are to be found in L. S. Vygotsky's Thought and Language, originally published in Russian, posthumously, in 1934, and later translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vahar. Vygotsky has been described - not unjustly - as "the Mozart of psychology." A personal favorite of mine is Joseph Church's Language and the Discovery of Reality: A Developmental Psychology of Cognition, a book one goes back to again and again. — Oliver Sacks