72 Quotes About Self-Discovery

In the ever-evolving journey of life, self-discovery is a path we all embark upon to understand our deepest desires, motivations, and true selves. This process invites introspection, challenges perspectives, and often leads to profound personal growth. Whether you're just beginning this journey or seeking inspiration along the way, words have the power to ignite reflection and transformation. Dive into this curated collection of insightful quotes designed to motivate and inspire your quest for self-awareness and personal development. Let these words be your guide as you explore the vast landscape of your inner world.

1. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” - Andre Gide

2. “A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” - Isaac Asimov

3. “Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.” - Chuck Palahniuk

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

5. “Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.” - Oscar Wilde

6. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust

7. “One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.” - A.A. Milne

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

9. “What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.” - Bertrand Russell

10. “It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.[Recalling in 1936 the discovery of the nucleus in 1909, when some alpha particles were observed instead of travelling through a very thin gold foil were seen to rebound backward, as if striking something much more massive than the particles themselves. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.]” - Ernest Rutherford

11. “The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.” - Brennan Manning

12. “I said I *liked* being half-educated; you were so much more *surprised* at everything when you were ignorant.” - Gerald Durrell

13. “They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.” - Francis Bacon

14. “A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.” - Abraham Lincoln

15. “Ketika untuk pertama kalinya saya berhasil menanam padi dengan metoda tanpa pengolahan, saya merasa benar-benar puas seperti apa yang dirasakan Colombus ketika ia menemukan benua Amerika” - Masanobu Fukuoka

16. “In other studies you go as far as other have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.” - Mary Shelley

17. “Sometimes a clearly defined error is the only way to discover the truth” - Benjamin Wiker

18. “Building a museum case and filling it with types of mussels is one way of knowing mussels; but on the shore, a mussel leads to a crab or a curious stone, which leads to another thing and eventually leads back to mussels, which is another and perhaps a more far-reaching way to know mussels. The sea that always seems like a metaphor, but one that is always moving, cannot be fixed, like a heart that is a like a tongue that is like a mystery that is like a story that is like a border that is like something altogether different and like everything at once. One thing leads to another, and this is the treasure that always runs through your fingers and never runs out.” - Rebecca Solnit

19. “There were three things sought by invaders who crossed oceans to discover America. Those were gold, gospel, glory. There are four things sought by aliens who crossed heavens to discover planet earth. Those are gold, gospel, glory, gene.” - Toba Beta

20. “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” - William Stafford

21. “Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.” - David Almond

22. “A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” - Alice Munro

23. “The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.” - Beryl Markham

24. “No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.” - Isaac Newton

25. “I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.” - Ernesto Che Guevara

26. “The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.” - Gregory Maguire

27. “It was the first time she'd discovered something she really didn't want to find, and she didn't know what to do once she'd found it.” - Jodi Picoult

28. “As time goes on, new and remoter aspects of truth are discovered which can seldom be fitted into creeds that are changeless.” - Clarence Day

29. “The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” - Rachel Carson

30. “We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.” - George Eliot

31. “The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.” - Rachel Carson

32. “Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.” - Ivo Andrić

33. “The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.” - Wally Lamb

34. “The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.” - Frances Hodgson Burnett

35. “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

36. “It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.” - Thomas Pynchon

37. “Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche - originality loses its authenticity in one's efforts to obtain originality.” - Criss Jami

38. “Pride and power fall when the person falls, but discoveries of truth form legacies that can be built upon for generations.” - Criss Jami

39. “It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

40. “I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it."[Patrick Ness slams library cuts (The Guardian, 23 June 2011)]” - Patrick Ness

41. “For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real.” - Richard Rhodes

42. “Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

43. “None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

44. “Truth is like a vast tree which yields more and more fruit the more you nurture it. The deeper the search in the mind of truth, the richer the discovery of the gems buried there.” - Mahatma Gandhi

45. “How my life has been brought to undiscovered lands, and how much richer it gets - all from words printed on a page.... How a book can have 560 pages, but in only three pages change the reader's life.” - Emoke B'Racz

46. “Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

47. “I am not an outsider. I am an insider who discovered that everyone else had gone out.” - Stephen J. Day

48. “I don't know what is behind the curtain; only that I need to find out.” - Richard Paul Evans

49. “In the first place, most princes apply themselves to the arts of war, in which I have neither ability nor interest, instead of to the good arts of peace. They are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms by hook or by crook than on governing well those that they already have.” - Thomas More

50. “To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.” - George MacDonald

51. “There are plenty of theories to listen to and follow but truth yearns to be discovered. When you find it, there is no doubt where to go.” - E'yen A. Gardner

52. “Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.” - William Golding

53. “It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation [...] Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy [...] All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.” - Mark Twain

54. “If you knew all about it, it wouldn't be the leading edge.” - Karl Pribram

55. “Sara: Tegan just recently discovered that unicorns don’t exist. Tegan: I just thought they were extinct.” - Tegan and Sara

56. “Do not ignore inspiration, it is your guide to self discovery.” - E'yen A. Gardner

57. “The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again......Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labeled: "Do not touch." There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.” - Jacob Bronowski

58. “The secret to discovery is to never believe existing facts.” - Bryant McGill

59. “Hive Queen: They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo- knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.Pequenino: While collectively...Hive Queen: Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.>Pequenino: So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.Hive Queen: Exactly.” - Orson Scott Card

60. “There is an undeniable exhilaration in moment of even the smallest discovery” - Graham Moore

61. “I feel like a child who has found a wonderful trail in the woods. Countless others have gone before and blazed the trail, but to the child it's as new and fresh as if it had never been walked before. The child is invariably anxious for others to join in the great adventure. It's something that can only be understood by actual experience. Those who've begun the journey, and certainly those who've gone further than I, will readily understand what I am saying.” - Randy Alcorn

62. “What I learned on my own I still remember” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

63. “It was youWho opened meLooked into my soulTo study meYou revealed youTo uncover me.” - David Somorai

64. “Wieder hob sie den Blick und richtete die Lampe auf ihr Gesicht. Sie schaute zum Fenster hinüber. Ihre Züge waren jetzt fast noch deutlicher. Sie konnte die Details um ihre Nase studieren, den Mund. Die Haare. Sie sah nicht gut aus. Resigniert schaltete sie die Lampe aus und ließ sie sinken.Und da sah sie es.Ihr Spiegelbild verschwand nicht.Es blieb im Fenster hängen, noch deutlicher als zuvor.Eine Sekunge lang ließ sie sich davon einfach faszinieren.Sie schnitt eine Grimasse.Aber das Spiegelbild veränderte sich nicht.” - Johan Harstad

65. “Days passing with discovery are the days of real happiness.” - Mehmet Murat ildan

66. “I didn't know the demonsthat walked across your memory.They came from the dustwhen you were at peacein your grave.” - Susie Clevenger

67. “If there is passion, let me feel its heat.I want my heart to beat fast,my breath raspy, my skin to burn.” - Susie Clevenger

68. “One day an intrepid sole will climb this mountain on its east side, reaching the summit and the passage that exist between the main peak and secondary peaks, by which he can descend to the west side of the mountain. It is at this site near Lake Brunner, between the main peak and an adjacent stone pyramid, in a "hidden cave" that has been sealed by earthquakes common in the region . . . where lust for Inca gold must end for some . . . but for that intrepid sole . . . it shall be just the beginning!” - Steven J. Charbonneau

69. “The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite - big, coarse granite - and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen. I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was at it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear - she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understood.” - Annie Dillard

70. “Children discover and verify their theories in quite the same way that scientists do: through experimentation. They manipulate the world and discover regularities of causation from those manipulations. Why do they do it? The discovery of regularities comes with a pleasurable burst of insight, which all of us, but especially children and scientists, continuously long for like bonbons or opium.” - Matthew M. Hurley Daniel C. Dennet Reginald B. Adams

71. “Every symbol, word, concept, discipline and field is only a temporary rest stop on the highway of discovery.” - Bryant McGill

72. “The mind, stretched to new dimensions by images, thoughts and ideas, can never return to its former shape.” - Travis Luedke