Search For Self Quotes

“Why can’t you just be yourself?” Stella asked once.
“Maybe I don’t know who that is,” her daughter shot back. And Stella understood, she did. That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath. So she understood why her daughter was searching for a self, and she even blamed herself for it.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“All the music I write is a search for myself.”
― Bruce Hornsby

“All ordinary people like us, everywhere, are trying to find the same things. It makes no difference whether they are New Englanders or Texans or Malayans or Finns. They all want to be left alone to conduct their own private search for a personal peace, a reasonable security, a little love, a chance to attain happiness through achievement.”
― Louise Dickinson Rich, We Took to the Woods

“The inexorable search for a stanza of meaning hangs like a thundercloud over the troposphere of humankind’s prosaic existence. A dithering sense of loss engulfs us. Humankind’s unattainable desire to achieve a slice of perfection generates a suspenseful haze of doom. A lingering stab of incompleteness coupled with the tantalizing riddles of fate are inalterably interlinked and imbued in all thinking people’s tormented soul. This cross coalescence of unattainable longing melds with the mystic tinged edges of uncertainty, spawned by the unanswerable questions posed by fate, fomenting a dialectical dissonance that distinguishes and ultimately exemplifies the arc of humankind’s plaintive subsistence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“At the same time she felt a tremendous, consuming, uncertainty that cancelled out everything, that left her with nothing...She had come to that city looking for another version of herself, a transfiguration. But she understood that her identity was insidious, a root that she would never be able to pull up, a prison in which she would be trapped.

Al tempo stesso sentiva un'incertezza tremenda che la consumava, che cancellava tutto, che la lasciava senza nulla...Era venuta in questa città cercando un'altra versioe di sé, una transfigurazione. Ma aveva capito che la sua identitá era insidiosa, una radice che lei non sarebbe mai riuscita a estirpare, un carcere in cui si sarebbe incastrata.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

“Man’s real nature is happiness. Happiness is inborn in the true self. His search for happiness is an unconscious search for his true self. The true self is imperishable; therefore, when a man finds it, he finds a happiness which does not come to an end.”
― Ramanna Maharshi

“Man’s real nature is happiness. Happiness is inborn in the true self. His search for happiness is an unconscious search for his true self. The true self is imperishable; therefore, when a man finds it, he finds a happiness which does not come to an end.”
― Ramana Maharshi

“Hey, the man who walks the streets unhappily with a suitcase in his hand! Are you looking for yourself, my friend, or are you running from yourself? You cannot look for yourself elsewhere, because it is only within you! And you can never escape from yourself, because it is in you too!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“There are countless things that you accumulate around you: fans, postcards, perfume bottles, necklaces hung on the walls. But on closer examination every object proves special, somehow unexpected. Your relationship with objects is selective, personal; only the things you feel yours become yours: it is a relationship with the physicality of things, not with an intellectual or affective idea that takes the place of seeing them and touching them. And once they are attached to you, marked by your possession, the objects no longer seem to be there by chance, they assume meaning as elements of a discourse, like a memory composed of signals and em- blems. Are you possessive? Perhaps there is not yet enough evidence to tell: for the present it can be said that you are possessive toward yourself, that you are attached to the signs in which you identify something of yourself, fearing to be lost with them.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler