72 Quotes About Self-understanding

I take my cues from the world around me and carefully paint a self-portrait that the world can’t help but accept. However, I would be much wiser to put down all such artistic notions and hold up the portrait of me painted by God simply because that is a picture at which the world can’t help but marvel.

Any evaluation of who I am is held to the sparseness of who I am without understanding that who I am in union with Who God is renders me capable of being everything that I am not.

We frantically expend our lives attempting to be what we think we should be, rather than being who we are. And if we would just settle into ourselves, we would soon discover that that is who we should have been all along.

Each of us needs to learn the unique language of our own soul.

Selfishness is hunkering down into our own little worlds because we fear that the vastness of the person standing next to us will call out the vastness of the person living within us.

Accepting the fact that I don’t even remotely understand all that I can be might prove an insurmountable barrier to some. Yet, if I can accept that fact, the far greater barrier constructed of my suffocatingly limited understanding of myself would be removed. And without a doubt, the former might be difficult to deal with but the latter is certain to kill me.

Self-knowledge, a spiritual metamorphosis, precedes understanding other people and comprehending the beauty of being part of the spontaneous interplay of the natural world.

Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.

Only in solitude can you discover a sense of your own beauty.