94+ Best Self Discovery Quotes: Exclusive Selection

Self discovery should be an important goal for everyone. Some people go through life playing a role to mask who they really are. Inspirational self-discovery quotes will make you look at life differently and help you live a meaningful life.

If you’re searching for best quotes about happiness and encouraging freedom quotes that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of famous this too shall pass quotes, inspiring better days quotes and powerful good luck quotes.

Most Famous Self Discovery Quotes

I think self discovery is the greatest achievement in life, because once you discover yourself and accept what you are, then you can fulfil your true potential and be happy. Marco Pierre White

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Aristotle

The journey toward self discovery is life’s greatest adventure. Arianna Huffington

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them. Thomas Merton

The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart. Julien Green

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free. Ralph Ellison

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. Carl Jung

Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle. Lewis Carroll

The delights of self discovery are always available. Gail Sheehy

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. Mahatma Gandhi

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates. Thomas Szasz

We can’t be afraid of change. You may feel very secure in the pond that you are in, but if you never venture out of it, you will never know that there is such a thing as an ocean, a sea. Holding onto something that is good for you now, may be the very reason why you don’t have something better. C. JoyBell C.

The longest journey is the journey inward. Dag Hannarskjold

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. C.G. Jung

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes you have to kind of die inside in order to rise from your own ashes and believe in yourself and love yourself to become a new person. Gerard Way

Self discovery is above all the realization that we are alone it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall that of our consciousness  between the world and ourselves. Octavio Paz

I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me. Hermann Hesse

There is no satisfaction that can compare with looking back across the years and finding you’ve grown in self control, judgment, generosity, and unselfishness. Ella Wheeler Wilcox

You’ll never be able to find yourself if you’re lost in someone else. Colleen Hoover

It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die. S. I. Hayakawa

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are. Kristin Hannah

A wise man travels to discover himself. James Russell Lowell

And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself? Rumi

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself. William Butler Yeats

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. Friedrich Nietzsche

I think somehow we learn who we really are and then we live with that decision. Eleanor Roosevelt

Bottom line is, even if you see em coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are. Joss Whedon

For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed. Clifton Fadiman

It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters. Amit Ray

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. Lao Tzu

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young. Maya Angelou

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. George Moore

The only journey is the one within. Rainer Maria Rilke

The searching out and thorough investigation of truth ought to be the primary study of man Cicero

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. Nelson Mandela

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of. Michel de Montaigne

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self. Aristotle

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one. James A. Froude

It takes courage to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives. Marianne Williamson

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want. Mark Twain

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question  who am I except the voice inside herself. Betty Friedan

We only become what we are by the radical and deep seated refusal of that which others have made of us. Jean Paul Sartre

When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself. Bob Marley

Know thyself?’ If I knew myself, I’d run away. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful only then do I find myself and feel comforted. Fernando Pessoa

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot. E.A. Bucchianeri

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. Douglas Adams

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves. E.M. Forster

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. Henry David Thoreau

He not busy being born is busy dying. Bob Dylan

There are three things extremely hard steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self. Benjamin Franklin

It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling. Chuck Palahniuk

Know yourself. Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful. Ann Landers

Love, like everything else in life, should be a discovery, an adventure, and like most adventures, you don’t know you’re having one until you’re right in the middle of it. E.A. Bucchianeri

Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes. Hugh Prather

If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without. Eckhart Tolle

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, he wants to reestablish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys. Henri Frederic Amiel

Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life. Shannon L. Alder

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Aristotle

The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours it is an amazing journey and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins. Bob Moawad

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves. Oscar Wilde

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them. John Irving

You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need. Jerry Gillies

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed. Stanisław Lem

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better. Blaise Pascal

Your inner strength is your outer foundation. Allan Rufus

One was a book I read by Mahatma Gandhi. In it was a passage where he said that religion, the pursuing of the inner journey, should not be separated from the pursuing of the outer and social journey, because we are not isolated beings. Satish Kumar

Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave. G.I. Gurdjieff

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. Aldous Huxley

The deeper I go into myself the more I realize that I am my own enemy. Floriano Martins

It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. H.W. Shaw

The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you. Eckhart Tolle

Painting is self discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. Jackson Pollock

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all. Donna Tartt

Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it. Buddha

When I step out on stage in front of thousands of people, I don’t feel that I’m being brave. It can take much more courage to express true feelings to one person. In spite of the risks, the courage to be honest and intimate opens the way to self discovery. It offers what we all want, the promise of love. Michael Jackson

All wonders you seek are within yourself. Sir Thomas Browne

In suffering we find our truest selves. Jessie Burton

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering. St. Augustine

It was like discovering that some part of you wasn’t yours at all. And it made me wonder what else I couldn’t claim. Sarah Dessen

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life. Muhammad Ali

I think that’s the real loss of innocence the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential. Steve Toltz

What you discover on your own is always more exciting than what someone else discovers for you it’s like the marriage between romantic love and an arranged marriage. Terrence Rafferty

Self observation is the first step of inner unfolding. Amit Ray

It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy. Lucille Ball

The Way to do is to be. Lao Tzu

The only journey is the journey within. Rainer Maria Rilke

Have love for your inner Self and everything else is done for you. Amit Ray

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. Carl Jung

It is when you lose sight of yourself, that you lose your way. To keep your truth in sight you must keep yourself in sight and the world to you should be a mirror to reflect to you your image; the world should be a mirror that you reflect upon. C. JoyBell C.