#self-discovery

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

"Sometimes you have to kind of die inside in order to rise from your own ashes and believe in yourself and love yourself to become a new person."

"I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted."

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

"If you want to fly on the sky, you need to leave the earth. If you want to move forward, you need to let go the past that drags you down."

"Self-observation is the first step of inner unfolding."

"If you don't know what to do next take the oath that will enhance your soul and erase your ego, & from the quiet space inside yourself, you will know what to do."

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."

"Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside."

"Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside."

"The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image."

"Self education is the key to self liberation."

"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."

"Love, like everything else in life, should be a discovery, an adventure, and like most adventures, you don’t know you’re having one until you’re right in the middle of it."

"I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me."

"Begin to acquire knowledge."

"When I step out on stage in front of thousands of people, I don't feel that I'm being brave. It can take much more courage to express true feelings to one person. [...] In spite of the risks, the courage to be honest and intimate opens the way to self-discovery. It offers what we all want, the promise of love."

"Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot."

"Education gives light, life and liberty."

"We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider every thing as moonshine, compared with the education of the heart."