Here’s the collection of best 100 self-discovery quotes to follow to know yourself, to find yourself and to know who you are. Self-introspection and self-observation will help you find the answer for old age question ‘who am I?’. If you’re spiritual, you’ll find these quotes to be very useful for your inner journey.
Self-discovery Quotes
1. Know thyself. – Plato
2. We must cultivate our garden. – Voltaire
3. Doubt everything. Find your own light. – Buddha
4. Creativity is an act of self-discovery. – Sebastian Esteverena
5. Love is who we are without our stories. – Byron Katie
6. An unexamined life is not worth living. – Socrates
7. A wise man travels to discover himself.” – James Russell Lowell
8. Dreams are the touchstones of our personality. – Henry David Thoreau
9. In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own. – Alice Walker
10. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. – Aristotle
11. Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions. – Edgar Cayce
12. The life which is not examined is not worth living. – Plato
13. Crises refine life. In them you discover what you are. – Allen K. Chalmers
14. Self-observation is the first step of inner unfolding. – Amit Ray
15. The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. – Joseph Campbell
16. Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. – William Shakespeare
17. The true profession of man is to find his way to himself. – Hermann Hesse
18. Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. – Henry David Thoreau
19. Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves. – Germaine Greer
20. And you? When will you begin your long journey into yourself? – Rumi
21. Look and you will find it-what is unsought will go undetected. – Sophocles
22. Insight occurs when, and to the degree that, one knows oneself. – Andrew Schneider
23. The self must know stillness before it can discover its true song. – Ralph Brum
24. The greatest discoveries are those that shed light unto ourselves. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
25. Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation. – Oscar Wilde
26. Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. – Pema Chodron
27. A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself. – Oprah Winfrey
28. Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. – Thomas Merton
29. Dreams are illustrations…from the book your soul is writing about you. – Marsha Norman
30. Self education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. – Isaac Asimov
31. The me I see is the me I’ll be, but the me I feel is the me that’s real. – Brian Hill
32. When you look for the good in others, you discover the best in yourself. – Martin Walsh
33. Your heart is the size of an ocean. Go find yourself in its hidden depths! – Rumi
34. The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. – Mahatma Gandhi
35. What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself. – Abraham Maslow
36. Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves. – Robert Frost
37. Never mind searching for who you are. Search for the person you aspire to be. – Robert Brault
38. If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
39. In the midst of winter, I finally learned – that there was in me an invincible summer. – Albert Camus
40. Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves. – Carol Pearson
41. The real point of being alive is to evolve into the whole person you were intended to be. – Oprah Winfrey
42. Listen. Make a way for yourself inside yourself. Stop looking in the other way of looking. – Rumi
43. It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere. – Agnes Repplier
44. All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why. – James Thurber
45. The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The meaning of life is giving your gift away. – David Viscott
46. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust
47. You are always your own best guru, your own best teacher, the answers are always inside you. – Sathya Sai Baba
48. How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be? – Vincent van Gogh
49. Every heart has a hidden treasure. A secret wish. A silent dream. A special goal to long for. – Jill Wolf
50. To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. – Henri Bergson
51. There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain or improving, and that’s your own self. – Aldous Huxley
52. Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought. – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
53. Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves. – Rollo May
54. Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are. – Bernice Johnson Reagon
55. Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced. – Alan Watts
56. To be aware of a single shortcoming in oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in someone else. – Dalai Lama
57. An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature. – Renoir
58. The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge. – Stephen Nachmanovitch
59. One’s own self is well hidden from one’s own self; of all mines of treasure, one’s own is the last to be dug up. – Friedrich Nietzsche
60. Joy is our goal, our destiny. We cannot know who we are except in joy. Not knowing joy, we do not know ourselves. – Marianne Williamson
61. We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. – Marcel Proust
62. We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light. – Mary Dunbar
63. If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us. – Hermann Hesse
64. Doing work you love is the dizzying path of saying yes to yourself and yes to a brilliant, hidden self you do not yet know. – Tama J. Kieves
65. Journey from the self to the Self and find the mine of gold. Leave behind what is sour and bitter and move toward the sweet. – Rumi
66. Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. – Rumi
67. Art is about energy positive and negative. All art has the power to heal because it helps us see who we are, and what we resist. – Shirley MacLaine
68. To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves. – Clarissa Pinkola Estes
69. Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering. – James Hillman
70. Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. – Sharon O’Brien
71. Sometimes in your life you will go on a journey. It will be the longest journey you have ever taken. It is the journey to find yourself. – Katherine Sharp
72. Try to put well into practice what you already know. In so doing, you will, in good time, discover the hidden things you now inquire about. – Rembrandt
73. I embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly. – William Stafford
74. Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.” – Alan Alda
75. The more one forgives himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. – Viktor Frankl
76. Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. – Buddha
77. Our world is incomplete until each one of us discovers what moves us – our passion. No other person can hear our calling. We must listen and act on it for ourselves. – Richard J. Leider
78. 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
79. I think that one’s art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows. – Emily Carr
80. We all need to look into the dark side of our nature- that’s where the energy is, the passion. People are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us we’re busy denying. – Sue Grafton
81. Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are. – Rachel Naomi Remen
82. Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one. – Marianne Williamson
83. Don’t rush into any kind of relationship. Work on yourself. Feel yourself, experience yourself and love yourself. Do this first and you will soon attract that special loving other. – Russ Von Hoelscher
84. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization. – Abraham Maslow
85. It is confidence in our bodies, minds and spirits that allows us to keep looking for new adventures, new directions to grow in, and new lessons to learn – which is what life is all about. – Oprah Winfrey
86. Goals help focus you on areas in both your personal and professional life that are important and meaningful, rather than being guided by what other people want you to be, do, or accomplish. – Catherine Pulsifer
87. In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself. – Krishnamurti
88. Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them. – Marilyn Ferguson
89. There is a positive you and there is a negative you. When you begin to realize which you is responsible for specific actions that you take, you can finally eliminate the negative and build upon the positive. – Michelle C. Ustaszeski
90. I have always thought it would be a blessing if each person could be blind and deaf for a few days during his early adult life. Darkness would make him appreciate sight, silence would teach him the joys of sound. – Helen Keller
91. Creativity requires introspection, self-examination, and a willingness to take risks. Because of this, artists are perhaps more susceptible to self-doubt and despair than those who do not court the creative muses. – Eric Maisel
92. Quit putting yourself in a little box by trying to live consistently with your past and explaining every little action you take. BE YOU. Fully. In this moment. Independent of what others may or may not ‘expect’ from you. – Brian Johnson
93. A leader will find it difficult to articulate a coherent vision unless it expresses his core values, his basic identity….one must first embark on the formidable journey of self-discovery in order to create a vision with authentic soul. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
94. 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. – Saint Augustine
95. When you realize that suffering and discomfort are the call to inquiry, you may actually begin to look forward to uncomfortable feelings. You may even experience them as friends coming to show you what you have not yet investigated thoroughly enough. – Byron Katie
96. We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
97. You must begin to trust yourself. If you do not then you will forever be looking to others to prove your own merit to you, and you will never be satisfied. You will always be asking others what to do, and at the same time, resenting those from whom you seek such aid. – Jane Roberts
98. The more in vibrational sync you are with who you really are, then the more you are allowing only those things that you’re wanting, and the less resistance there is. And the less resistance there is, then the less delay between the idea of the thought and the receiving of it. – Abraham-Hicks
99. Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating – the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to – you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide. – Sogyal Rinpoche
100. Can you imagine experiencing the world as a great sandbox given for us to play in like we did as children? As we play, we can also open ourselves to the exploration of our edges, always creating new adventures of self-exploration as we let go of old out-dated beliefs about ourselves. – Judith-Annette Milburn