“A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.”— Alan Watts, amazon.com
“If you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.”— Alan Watts, amazon.com
“Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.”— Alan Watts, amazon.com
“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beg…”— Alan Watts, amazon.com
“Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.”— Alan Watts, amazon.com
“We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us.”— André Gide, amazon.com
“Most people have this version of themselves they believe is the true version. Now, a lot of the time that version doesn’t line up with what everyone else sees. Maybe you know you’re braver than you’ve been all your life. Maybe you‘re labeled with a gender that doesn’t fit you. We’ve all got discrepa…”— Adam Gnade, amazon.com
“What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common...”— Stephen King, amazon.com
“To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”— Joan Didion, amazon.com
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”— Michiko Kakutani, nytimes.com
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them,…”— Joan Didion, amazon.com
“Every difficult experience is an opportunity to redefine yourself. I’m not saying you have to become an acclaimed writer or a world famous artist, or an actress or a motivational speaker or anything. You simply have to commit to building a better you – a stronger you, a more empathetic you, a more l…”— Gee Grewal, thoughtcatalog.com
“Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, n…”— Kathleen Glasgow, amazon.com
“Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.”— Nick Hawk, amazon.com
“I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”— Charles Dickens, amazon.com
“Trying to make sense of your life is trying to see if the old story checks out, if the person you once were would be happy with the life they lead today. You're looking for answers in people that don't exist.”— Brianna Wiest, amazon.com
“Work on closing the gap between who the world thinks you are and who you know you are.”— Brianna Wiest, amazon.com