self-discovery Quotes

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?