135 Inspirational Self Discovery Quotes

In a world that constantly pulls us in various directions, taking a moment to journey inward can be a transformative experience. Self-discovery is not merely a destination but a lifelong adventure, unveiling layers of who we are and who we are meant to be. Whether you are on the brink of a new chapter or deep in introspection, inspirational quotes can serve as gentle guides and powerful motivators. Here, we've curated a collection of 135 quotes that promise to awaken the soul and ignite the spirit of exploration within you, offering wisdom and insight for every step of your path.

1. “When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” - Maya Angelou

2. “Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.” - Lewis Carroll

3. “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” - Aristotle

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

5. “At the center of your beingyou have the answer;you know who you areand you know what you want.” - Lao Tzu

6. “When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement. ” - Max Ernst

7. “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” - Ralph Ellison

8. “Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.” - G.I. Gurdjieff

9. “We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.” - John Irving

10. “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” - Mahatma Gandhi

11. “Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good; and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig.” - Marcus Aurelius

12. “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.” - E.M. Forster

13. “It takes courage...to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.” - Marianne Williamson

14. “He not busy being born is busy dying.” - Bob Dylan

15. “[B]egin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in.” - Alan Alda

16. “For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?” - Rainer Maria Rilke

17. “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” - Herman Hesse

18. “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.” - Hermann Hesse

19. “The only journey is the one within.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

20. “The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours - it is an amazing journey - and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.” - Bob Moawad

21. “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.” - Aristotle

22. “It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!” - Ralph Ellison

23. “It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.” - Chuck Palahniuk

24. “It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself.” - Betty Friedan

25. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - C.G. Jung

26. “And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?” - Rumi

27. “If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without.” - Eckhart Tolle

28. “We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.” - Blaise Pascal

29. “In youth, it was a way I had,To do my best to please.And change, with every passing ladTo suit his theories.But now I know the things I knowAnd do the things I do,And if you do not like me so,To hell, my love, with you.” - Dorothy Parker

30. “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.” - Quentin Crisp

31. “If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.” - J. Krishnamurti

32. “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.” - Sir Walter Scott

33. “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. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them” - Thomas Merton

34. “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.” - Jess C. Scott

35. “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.” - Jess C. Scott

36. “Before you can be anything, you have to be yourself. That's the hardest thing to find.” - E.L. Konigsburg

37. “I've heard people say that they lose themselves in a kiss. But in that moment, it was the opposite for me. I felt like I found myself. Not how I wished I was, or who I was afraid I was becoming, but who I really was.” - Jon Skovron

38. “There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don't believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it--and almost all of us have one way or another--this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.” - James Baldwin

39. “The deeper I go into myself the more I realize that I am my own enemy.” - Floriano Martins

40. “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.” - Gerard Way

41. “Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.” - Herman Hesse

42. “The Way to do is to be.” - Lao Tzu

43. “To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.” - Søren Kierkegaard

44. “It's daring to be curious about the unknown, to dream big dreams, to live outside prescribed boxes, to take risks, and above all, daring to investigate the way we live until we discover the deepest treasured purpose of why we are here.” - Luci Swindoll

45. “I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.” - Donna Tartt

46. “Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.” - Joss Whedon

47. “I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.” - Steve Toltz

48. “Everything in this world was so new, so wonderful and strange--like things in my old world, but better []For sixteen years my soul had been drawn towards this place, this alien homeland, toward its rainbow sunrises and whispering trees" Breena Bitter Frost (on the brink of discovery; about why she never quite felt like she belonged in the land over the Crystal River)” - Kailin Gow

49. “I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.” - Rabih Alameddine

50. “It felt good to be surrounded by books, by all this solid knowledge, by these objects that could be ripped page by page but couldn't be torn if the pages all held together.” - David Levithan

51. “It was the most amazing feeling in the world. to know that something right happened, and to know that it had happened not through luck or command but simply because it was right.” - David Levithan

52. “Long live protest songs, in whatever form they take.” - David Levithan

53. “You don't realize - the great thing about change is how quickly we get used to it. So I'm not complaining. the more things change,the more they don't stay the same. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They might not change everywhere all at once - but there are moments when the impossible becomes the inevitable, and the rest is just a matter of time.” - David Levithan

54. “We are not taught "love thy neighbor unless their skin is a different color from yours " or "love thy neighbor unless they don't make money as you do" or "love thy neighbor unless they don't share your belies." We are taught "love thy neighbor". No exceptions. We are all in this together - every single one of us. And the only way we are going to survive as a society is through compassion. A Great Community does not mean we all think the same things or do the same things. It simply means we are willing to work together and are willing to love despite our differences.” - David Levithan

55. “Because that's the thing about mean people: They make you think that the world will never work, that there are divides that you will fall into if you approach. It takes a whole lot of good people to fill in the breach created by a single mean one.” - David Levithan

56. “I just needed to realize that style was like personality - it didn't always have to be consistent; it just had to be something you lived with.” - David Levithan

57. “I am proud that I defy your categories. I am proud that I don't fit easily into any box. I am proud of all the things I am and all the things i can be. Question yourself every time you think you only see one thing in me.” - David Levithan

58. “Maybe you have to live under cover for a while before you can find your true character.” - Hugo Hamilton

59. “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

60. “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

61. “History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...” - A. S. Byatt

62. “The more kindness and justice are challenged, the more we must embrace them. Only when you are challenged - and only when you challenge yourself - do you discover what truly matters.” - David Levithan

63. “Once you've recognized your own limits, you've raised yourself to a higher level of being, since you're closer to the real you...” - Banana Yoshimoto

64. “We stay busy so we don't have to admit we don't have all the answers. After long enough with our constant distractions, we end our search for them. And God. Soon enough, we'll all come to realize we can't be God. We'll settle for telling ourselves we can. Or we'll just make one up.” - Brian Krans

65. “Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.” - Adolf Loos

66. “It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters,” - Amit Ray

67. “It was like discovering that some part of you wasn't yours at all. And it made me wonder what else I couldn't claim.” - Sarah Dessen

68. “Have love for your inner Self and everything else is done for you.” - Amit Ray

69. “It is when you lose sight of yourself, that you lose your way. To keep your truth in sight you must keep yourself in sight and the world to you should be a mirror to reflect to you your image; the world should be a mirror that you reflect upon.” - C. JoyBell C.

70. “She wasn't tracking down her father to learn more about him. She was tracking him down to learn more about herself.” - Brad Meltzer

71. “Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are.” - Sarah Dessen

72. “It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.” - Anne Tyler

73. “When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.” - Bob Marley

74. “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. ” - Michael Jackson

75. “Gratification comes when you help someone else.” - Trenice Carter

76. “I have realized; it is during the times I am far outside my element that I experience myself the most. That I see and feel who I really am, the most! I think that's what a comet is like, you see, a comet is born in the outer realms of the universe! But it's only when it ventures too close to our sun or to other stars that it releases the blazing "tail" behind it and shoots brazen through the heavens! And meteors become sucked into our atmosphere before they burst like firecrackers and realize that they're shooting stars! That's why I enjoy taking myself out of my own element, my own comfort zone, and hurling myself out into the unknown. Because it's during those scary moments, those unsure steps taken, that I am able to see that I'm like a comet hitting a new atmosphere: suddenly I illuminate magnificently and fire dusts begin to fall off of me! I discover a smile I didn't know I had, I uncover a feeling that I didn't know existed in me... I see myself. I'm a shooting star. A meteor shower. But I'm not going to die out. I guess I'm more like a comet then. I'm just going to keep on coming back.” - C. JoyBell C.

77. “It was so quiet, I could hear my own breathing, loud in my ears. Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything any neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are.” - Sarah Dessen

78. “History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.” - Edward Hallett Carr

79. “The most adventurous journey to embark on; is the journey to yourself, the most exciting thing to discover; is who you really are, the most treasured pieces that you can find; are all the pieces of you, the most special portrait you can recognize; is the portrait of your soul.” - C. JoyBell C.

80. “single people without children have a "childish sensitivity and are unwilling or unable to compromise or fit in” - Ninni Holmqvist

81. “I also believe that when people are going through difficult situations in life... it causes them to search a lot more. They search life and search their soul. When you’re searching, you’re suddenly a lot more open to the world around you, to the possibilities, to things you never thought about before. — When you’re happy, you don’t question the world so much. When you’re lost, you question everything. The very reason why it is so essential to human self-discovery” - Cecelia Ahern

82. “Spending time looking for what is missing in your life is futile; if you fail to look within yourself. When we challenge everything we believe we are, we reveal that which we never knew about our own selves.” - Nicolas G. Janovsky

83. “When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

84. “In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.” - CHOGYAM TRUNGPA

85. “lots of things happen in our lives without any apparent justification. but whatever happens to us,takes us one step ahead in the path of self realisation.The truth is we all are travellers in the life's eternal journey, to meet for a short while,to care and share but we tend to forget that nothing lasts forever.if only we could cultivate a sense of detachment,life would have been much easier.” - Chitralekha Paul

86. “Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.” - Stanisław Lem

87. “People like us, we think differently, don't we? We are different. We do all the things that others do. But when it comes down to it, we don't need anyone else. We're happy doing what we do and having obligation interferes with that. And sometimes I think we don't even need ourselves. What's most important is to find out whether we're right or not.” - Simon Morden

88. “A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.” - Damon Galgut

89. “To be calm and compassionate you need courage and conviction.” - Solange nicole

90. “Though it may be interesting to know how many hairs there are on the human head, or how the giant red spot on the surface of Jupiter was formed, the real truths we are interested in are those about ourselves.” - Stephen Richards

91. “Do not limit yourself to your own preconceptions of yourself, but throw yourself out onto a blank page that you haven't written on yet, and see what you find out about you, see what story unfolds, see what happens! I always do this, and sometimes it can be very frightening! To very often have a blank page with nothing written on it yet! I feel as though I am a soul with a single covering–my body of skin– and that's the only thing between me on the inside and the rest of the world! It's quite frightening to begin each day on a blank page, forgetting your own preconceptions of yourself and allowing your mind to embrace the new! It is like meeting yourself for the first time, over and over again!” - C. JoyBell C.

92. “I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.” - Aberjhani

93. “You find out who you are by figuring out who and what you're not” - Kelly Cutrone

94. “We make such messes in this life, both accidently and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything any neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are.” - Sarah Dessen

95. “The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.” - Eckhart Tolle

96. “If you think you’re good people, and if you are, how would you know? Is it something you always knew? Or was it something you found? Some people are naturally good at it […]. Is it worth trying to be something you’re not? Just because it’s right?” - Jen Wang

97. “Life is a valuable and unique opportunityto discover who you are.But it seems as soon as you nearanswering that age-old question,something unexpected always happensto alter your course.And who it is you thought you weresuddenly changes.Then comes the frustrating realizationthat no matter how long life endures,no matter how many experiencesare muddled through in this existence,you may never really be ableto answer the question....Who am I? Because the answer, like the seasons,constantly, subtly, inevitably changes.And who it is you are today,is not the same person you will be tomorrow.” - Richelle Goodrich

98. “Today I am someone different. Today I have finally become who I really am.” - C. JoyBell C.

99. “In ourselves our safety must be sought. By our own right hand it must be wrought.” - William Wordsworth

100. “It is only when you accept how different you all are, that you will be able to see how much the same you all are. Don't expect anybody to be the same as you, then you will see that you are in many ways the same as everybody.” - C. JoyBell C.

101. “I don't want someone to believe my lies, I need someone to accept my truths.” - Kellie Elmore

102. “self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.” - Elizabeth Cady Stanton

103. “التفكير هو الذي جعل الإنسان يتطور. فالإنسان تطور عندما أدرك ما الذي حوله. عندما فهم. وحلل. وربط واكتشف. وأول ما اكتشف: ذاته..” - أنيس منصور

104. “Putting someone down with name calling reveals your own low self-esteem.” - Stephen Richards

105. “Perhaps I was being picky, but I really didn’t think being able to spell orgasm without being spotted a vowel was asking too much.” - Summer Daniels

106. “A wise man travels to discover himself.” - James Russell Lowell

107. “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

108. “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.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

109. “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.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

110. “Your inner strength is your outer foundation” - Allan Rufus

111. “We can't be afraid of change. You may feel very secure in the pond that you are in, but if you never venture out of it, you will never know that there is such a thing as an ocean, a sea. Holding onto something that is good for you now, may be the very reason why you don't have something better.” - C. JoyBell C.

112. “Self-observation is the first step of inner unfolding.” - Amit Ray

113. “I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.” - Natalie Goldberg

114. “The thing about traveling alone, is that you run into your insecurities and fears times ten the normal! You run into all the good things and all the bad things about yourself on a daily basis, and are allowed the opportunity to truly become your own friend. Traveling alone is a learning process; some people travel for leisure, I travel to run into myself!” - C. JoyBell C.

115. “Judgment should never enter into the hearts and minds of others while observing another in a pain that cannot be understood.” - Amy Denise

116. “I shall now call myself;I shall now call.In the forest of my heart, seeing myself,I shall love myself and love myself.I shall be my own quest,My absolute wealth.The journey of light supreme will commenceIn the heart of freedom.” - Sri Chinmoy

117. “Learn to be brave and adventurous because you’ll never discover your place in the world, if you’re too afraid to leave your own backyard.” - Nina Guilbeau

118. “What no one really talks about, though, is the main reason many of us fail with our weight loss efforts: our minds won't let us.” - Helen M. Ryan

119. “Sometimes it takes falling apart to see exactly how or what loosened the mortar. Sometimes we find we are responsible for the how & the what. As unpleasant as it is when it happens, one cannot help but appreciate these times for what you learn serves as a beacon. Of course this is only half the battle. Which means you're already half way there.” - Colleen Truscott Fry

120. “Some girls have to go to college to discover what they are good at; some are born doing what they must without even truly knowing why. I felt a hole in my heart shaped like a dark door I needed to guard.” - Catherynne M. Valente

121. “I want to know the age. The sex. Most of all, the fingerprints. I'd like to identify who it is. After he had agreed, and I had left the office, walking to calm myself, I thought: And who am I? Please tell me who I am and what I'm doing.” - Paul Theroux

122. “Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.” - David Mitchell

123. “Make sure your subconscious knows you love it by stroking it until it purrs.” - Teresa Sue McAdams

124. “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.” - Fernando Pessoa

125. “But, astonishingly, I'm not broken. I'm not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. ... Living my life. And it wouldn't be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love.” - Rosamund Lupton

126. “There are no ordinary people. The blur or everyday reality has created a world in which most of us have forgotten our unique and sacred existence...it is [our] true self, once discovered, that enables us to understand more clearly the nature of our world, and our own existence.” - Kim Chestney

127. “There's no alternative to being yourself. Accept it, honour it, value it - and get on with it.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

128. “I have rubbed, knocked and brushed up against a thousand windows, trying to get an image.” - Anthony Liccione

129. “There are essentially two questions in life - a spiritual question and a material question. The spiritual question is 'Who am I?' The material question is 'What am I to do with my life?' One leads to the other.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

130. “Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life.” - Shannon L. Alder

131. “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

132. “Rest and peace should not be left until you're deceased. They are two vital life incredients everybody needs and seeks.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

133. “Within you, you will find everything you need to be complete.” - Bryant McGill

134. “You'd be surprised how often you doubt your own sanity when you don't understand your own capacities.” - K.M. Mac Aulay

135. “We spend our lives asking the question, ‘What do people want me to do? Who do they want me to be?’ But this is a betrayal of our inner truth. We should be investing our lives in the pursuit of discovering who we are and what we were created to do.” - Elizabeth Grace Saunders