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I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?
Oct 1, 2025
The greatest discovery in life is self-discovery. Until you find yourself you will always be someone else. Become yourself.
You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.
Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.
Like an old gold-panning prospector, you must resign yourself to digging up a lot of sand from which you will later patiently wash out a few minute particles of gold ore.
The greatest discovery in life, the most precious treasure, is of awareness. Without it you are bound to be in darkness, full of fears. And you will go on creating new fears - there is no end to it. You will live in fear, you will die in fear, and you will never be able to taste something of freedom. And it was all the time your potential; any moment you could have claimed it, but you never claimed it.
A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.
Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes.
The greatest discovery in life is to discover that our essential nature does not share the limits nor the destiny of the body and mind.
Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
For most men, life is a search for the proper Manila envelope in which to get themselves filed.
One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.
It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.
One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.
Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.
There is no satisfaction that can compare with looking back across the years and finding you've grown in self-control, judgment, generosity, and unselfishness.
I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.
You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, wants to re-establish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.
What you discover on your own is always more exciting than what someone else discovers for you - it's like the marriage between romantic love and an arranged marriage.
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.
The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.
There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self.
Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.