self-realization Quotes

“It was you and me, Tom. We did this to them. To us.”

“That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.”

“Perhaps I should have run the other way right then and there, realizing that a guy like this might bring out the worst in me.”

“It later struck him that the picture he had drawn of Memo sitting domestically home wasn’t exactly the girl she was. The kind he had in mind, though it bothered him to admit it, was more like Iris seemed to be, only she didn’t suit him.”

“All the things he had said to make himself believe that she was good and kind and that her side was really the right side sounded to him silly now.”

“In front of him he distinguished a shadowy figure, motionless. ‘Wilbur Mercer! Is that you?’ My god, he realized; it’s my shadow.”

“He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up.”

“When I thought about Jakob, I realized that his cold dedication to Find helped me get over my separation from Ethan—there was no time for grieving. I had too much work to do.”

“One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not ever’body is goin to get older with you.”

“Now I was safe, now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there.”

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

″[Mrs. Pentstemmon] had said Sophie was a witch. Oddly enough, Sophie accepted this without any trouble at all. That explained the popularity of certain hats, she thought. It explained Jane Farrier’s Count Whatsit. It possibly explained the jealousy of the Witch of the Waste. It was as if Sophie had always known this. But she had thought it was not proper to have a magic gift because she was the eldest of three. Lettie had been far more sensible about such things.”

″‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,’ it suddenly occurred to him. ‘But how could that be, when I did everything properly?’ he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.”

“The scales fell from Lucy’s eyes. How had she stood Cecil for a moment? He was absolutely intolerable, and the same evening she broke off her engagement.”

“Every now and then I could see myself—truly see myself—and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart.”

“I didn’t know that I had such emotions within me.”

In presence of this ingenuous greatness of soul, Aramis felt himself little. It was the second time he had been compelled to bend before real superiority of heart, much more powerful than splendour of mind.

“A sense of inferiority and inadequacy interferes with the attainment of your hopes, but self-confidence leads to self-realisation and successful achievement.”

″‘That was the night, in the kitchen, that I realized I was no better than who I was....And I no longer felt angry at Waverly. I felt tired and foolish, as if I had been running to escape someone chasing me, only to look behind and discover there was no one there.‘”

“And when that celestial chime sounds, perhaps a mirror will suddenly serve its truer purpose—revealing to a man not who he imagines himself to be, but who he has become.”

“I am not who I was, but I know who I am.”

″It is said that we can’t attain enlightenment, let alone feel contentment and joy, without seeing who we are and what we do, without seeing our patterns and our habits. This is called maitri - developing loving-kindness and an unconditional friendship with ourselves.″

″ Gray sheep, gray sheep. Which was all nice enough, until the bright orange balloon floated by.”

“It caught Mathilda’s eye while she was grazing. Mathilda had never seen anything so magnificent. At once, something inside her woke up.”