Aphorisms, quotes and phrases about self-discovery, a fundamental factor to live one's life to the best as we want by following our way of being without being influenced by others.
Phrases about themselves
- My friend, take care of your psyche, know yourself, because once we know ourselves, we can learn to take care of ourselves. (Socrates)
- There are ... things a man is afraid to say to himself, and every decent man has a number of these things hidden in his mind. (Fedor Dostoevsky)
- The purpose of life is the development of ourselves, the perfect realization of our nature: this is why we exist. (Oscar Wilde)
- Your self is well hidden from yourself; of all the mines of treasures, that of the self is the last to be excavated. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
- It is a first big step towards knowing yourself, being able to recognize what makes you happy. (Lucille Ball)
- Self-knowledge is a birth in one's own light, in one's own sun. The man who knows himself is a living man. (Marie-Madeleine Davy)
- We are all part of the creation. We are all kings, poets, musicians; and all that remains is to open up like a lotus to discover what is hidden inside us. (Henry Miller)
- Knowing yourself is the principle of all wisdom. (Aristotle)
- Your vision becomes clear only when you look inside your heart. Those who look outside dream. Whoever looks inside wakes up. (Carl Gustav Jung)
- Others can give you a name or number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That's something you can only discover yourself from within. (Thomas Merton)
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- Would you like to meet others? Read yourself, and learn! (Friedrich Schiller)
- The more you understand yourself, the more you will understand the world. (Paulo Coelho)
- Who knows others is wise; those who know themselves are enlightened. (Lao Tzu)
- A man who knows himself can get out of himself and watch his reactions, like an observer. (Adam Smith)
- There is only one corner of the universe that you can be sure of improving and that is your own self. (Aldous Leonard Huxley)
- Understanding other people is intelligence, understanding yourself is wisdom. (Lao Tse)
- Nobody knows each other, as long as they are only themselves and they are not another. (Wilhelm August von Schlegel)
- Knowing yourself means knowing all your aspects, all your potential: the murderer, the sinner, the criminal, the saint, the virtue, the god, the devil; know all the aspects, the whole range of possibilities. (Osho)
- How can you know yourself? Not through contemplation, but through acting. (Johann Wolfgang Goethe)
- Don't worry if others don't like you. Worry if you don't appreciate yourself. (Confucius)
- I carry an undetected individual in me. He knows me, but I don't know anything about him, except that my person is his shadow with his unavowable appetites and his need for secrecy. (Joë Bousquet)
- Accept yourself as you are. And this is the most difficult thing in the world, because it goes against your education, against what you have learned, against your culture. (Osho)
- Everything that is outside of you can be stolen at any time. Only what's inside you is safe. (Jeannette Winterson)
- The road to self-knowledge is full of potholes. (Nyasha Madavo)
- Being authentic means accepting to see who you are, what you are not, and not what you imagine yourself to be observing your character in a mirror. (Karlfried Graf Dürckheim)
- It is a disconcerting thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth", and so it goes away. Really disconcerting. (Robert M. Pirsig)
- Be what you are. This is the first step towards becoming better than you are. (Julius Charles Hare)
- Your job is to discover your world and then wholeheartedly give yourself to it. (Buddha)
- Anything that irritates us in others can guide us to understanding ourselves. (Carl Jung)
- The most influential person who speaks to you all day is yourself, so you should be very careful with what you say to yourself! (Zig Ziglar)
- You need to know your secret. (Swami Nithyananda)
- Every man should look within himself to learn the meaning of life.It is not something that is discovered: it is something that must be modeled. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
- Your vision will only become clearer when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Those who look inside wake up. (Carlo Gustav Jung)
Phrases about being yourself
- Try to find out what your mission is, then start doing it with passion. Always be the best of whatever you are. (Martin Luther King)
- It is often said that this or that person has not yet found himself. But one's self is not something that is found, it is something that is created. (Thomas Szasz)
- Knowing yourself is the greatest service you can render the world. (Ramana Maharshi)
- Only those who know each other are masters of themselves. (Pierre de Ronsard)
- If I could explain myself with words I wouldn't need to make films. (Lars von Trier)
- Each of us is born with a solitary task to carry out and those he meets help him to accomplish it or even make it even more difficult: unfortunate the one who cannot distinguish one from the other. (Christian Bobin)
- Listening to your heart is not easy. Finding out who you are is not easy. It takes a lot of hard work and courage to know who you are and what you want. (Sue Bender)
- The true fool, the one who gods mock and destroy, is the one who does not know himself. (Oscar Wilde)
- All over the world people reach the limits of the absurd to avoid confronting their souls. (Carl Gustav Jung)
- Nothing seems foolish to me than the Socratic maxim: Know yourself. The real way to get to knowledge should rather be: forget yourself. (Paul Claudel)
- The easiest person to deceive is ourselves. (Edward Bunker)
- An artist is, first of all, one who has self-confidence. (Henry Miller)
- "Know yourself". Maximum as pernicious as ugly. Anyone who observes himself stops his development. The caterpillar that tried to "get to know each other well" would never become a butterfly. (André Gide)
- Tell me what you think you are and I'll tell you what you are not. (Henri Frederic Amiel)
- Health does not analyze itself, nor does it look in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves. (Italo Svevo)
- Men, instead of looking inside themselves, look at the faults of others. (Aulo Persio)
- I'm starting to measure myself in strength, not in pounds. Sometimes in smiles. (Laurie Halse Anderson)
- Being too self-aware is a disease - a real deep disease. (Fëdor Dostoevskij)
- Discover yourself, otherwise you will have to depend on the opinions of other people who don't know themselves. (Osho)
- Go to the moon, it's not that far. The furthest journey is the one within ourselves. (Anaïs Nin)
- "Know thyself" is an excellent precept, but it is only up to God to put it into practice: who else but He can know his own essence? (Voltaire)
- Most people lose their souls when they enter the world, as easily as they lose a book on a move. (Christian Bobin)
- No one who knows himself can absolve himself. (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
- Who knows others is wise; those who know themselves are enlightened. (Lao Tzu)
- Peace treaties with themselves are often the most difficult to conclude. (Romain Gary)
- Why do you compare yourself with someone else? If you don't compare yourself to another you will be what you really are. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
- Until we are lost we do not begin to know ourselves. (Henry David Thoreau)
- I don't know what's worse: don't know who you are and be happy, or become what you've always wanted to be, and feel alone. (Daniel Keyes)
- Perhaps this is what is sought in life, nothing but this, the greatest pain possible to become oneself before dying. (Louis-Ferdinand Céline)
- Know yourself? You can say yes without fear of making a mistake when you discover more flaws in yourself than others see. (Friedrich Hebbel)
- If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral. (Katherine Mansfield)
- The true vocation of everyone is one, that of knowing oneself. (Hermann Hesse)
Phrases about self-discovery
- Over the course of our lives, little by little, we discover who we really are. And as we discover ourselves, we get lost. (Haruki Murakami)
- The thing that is really difficult, and also really incredible, is to give up being perfect and start the job of becoming yourself. (Anna Quindlen)
- Finding God means finding yourself. (Pierre Dehaye)
- Yet men go to admire the peaks of the mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the very wide currents of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, while neglecting themselves. (St. Augustine)
- A glass mirror is used to look at the face and works of art are used to look at one's soul.(George Bernard Shaw)
- The only thing that matters in life is your opinion about yourself. (Osho)
- O man! Travel by yourself in yourself. (Gialal al-Din Rumi)
- If you know the enemy and yourself, your victory is sure. If you know yourself but not the enemy, your odds of winning and losing are equal. If you don't know the enemy and you don't know yourself, you will succumb to every battle. (Sun Tzu)
- Look well in yourself for what you want to be, since you are everything. The history of the whole world dozes in each of us. (Gialal al-Din Rumi)
- We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know who we are against. (Samuel Huntington)
- What is behind us and what is in front of us, are very little compared to what is inside us. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
- They can live at the same address, but the man who comes home is always different from the one who went out in the morning ... (Henry Ford)
- Yes, which is the deepest, the most impenetrable of the two? The ocean or the human heart? (Lautréamont)
- The main task in everyone's life is to give birth to himself. (Erich Fromm)
- Are they actually what others say about me? Or am I just what I know about myself? (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
- You can understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. (GK Chesterton)
- Our sense of self is born in our social interactions: the others are the mirrors that reflect our image, an idea that has been summarized in the sentence: I am what I think you think I am. (Daniel Goleman)
- There are three really hard things: steel, diamond and knowing yourself. (Benjamin Franklin)
- There is a person with whom we never come to be completely sincere, although we know that she knows us deeply and we can count on her benevolence: ourselves. (Rémy de Gourmont)
- It is what we think we already know that often prevents us from knowing. (Claude Bernard)
- I know that I am what I am. But I'm not sure what I am. (Mason Cooley)
- I know what I don't want to be, but I have yet to find out what I want to be. (Orhan Pamuk)
- You have to know yourself. Even if this did not serve to find the truth, it would serve to regulate one's life, and there is nothing more right. (Blaise Pascal)
- Knowing ourselves well would be as sad as knowing the hour of death. This is why God has hidden one thing and the other. (Pitigrilli)
- You decide to be yourself: and know that whoever finds himself loses his unhappiness. (Matthew Arnold)
- Each man has several men in him, and most of us bounce from one identity to another without even knowing who he is. (Paul Auster)
- Whoever does not meditate is like one who never reflects himself. (Father Pio)
- Of what I can be for me, not only can you know nothing, but neither can I know myself. (Luigi Pirandello)
- All man's miseries derive from his inability to isolate himself in a room and remain alone in peace. (Blaise Pascal)
- There are powers within you that if you could discover and use them, they would do anything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become. (Orison Swett Marden)
- Those who are never alone cannot truly know themselves. (Paulo Coelho)
- In each of us there is another being that we don't know. He speaks to us through dreams and lets us know that he sees things very differently from what we believe we are. (Carl Gustav Jung)
- Never lose sight of this important truth, that nobody can be truly great until he has acquired a knowledge of himself, a knowledge that can only be acquired by loneliness. (Johann Georg von Zimmermann)
- The only journey is the inner one. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
- A moment of introspection is sometimes worth a life of experience. (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)
- Go to the moon, it's not that far. The furthest journey is the one within ourselves. (Anaïs Nin)
