Meaningful Quotes. Thoughtful Insights. Helpful Tools.
Advanced Search Options

Quotes about Self-discovery

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
- Thomas Merton
How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man's city?(100)
- Thomas Merton
There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts.. see within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me..it was magical. We are already one, yet we know it not.
- Thomas Merton
If you want to identify me, he says to the British officers who are questioning him, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. page 25 in the book called, The Man in the Sycamore Tree by Edward Rice
- Thomas Merton
The first step toward finding God--who is truth--is to discover the truth about myself; and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error
- Thomas Merton
The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.
- Thomas Merton
The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done
- Thomas Merton
A man becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary.
- Thomas Merton
We discover our true selves in love.
- Thomas Merton
We are warmed by the fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts.
- Thomas Merton
If we enter into ourselves, find our true self, and then pass beyond the inner I, we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the I AM of the Almighty.
- Thomas Merton
There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.
- Thomas Merton