I set out, questioning,

upon the path to myself.

-Heraclitus

She was lost in her longing to understand.
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Empty-handed I entered the world.

Barefoot I leave it.

My coming, my going -

Two simple happenings

That got entangled.

-Kozan Ichikyo

Unwind my riddle.
-Stephen Crane

There is only one story -
going out into disunity
and coming back into integration.
-Joseph Campbell

When I look at myself in the mirror
I see a hundred selves.
-Elizabeth Coatsworth

Everything that has ever happened to you
was caused by what you have projected yourself to be.
-Imre Vallyon

Still, I search in these woods
and find nothing worse
than myself caught between
the grapes and the thorns.
-Anne Sexton

Where once a nonsense built her nest
With skulls and flowers and all things queer.
-Robert Graves

Only by much searching and mining,
are gold and diamonds obtained,
and man can find every truth connected with his being,
if he will dig deep into the mine of his soul.
-James Allen

I shall excavate the strata of my soul.
-Christian Morgenstern

He was in the throes of one of those crises
in which the soul lays bare its every last corners,
just as the ocean, in the travail of a storm,
splits open to display everything from the seaweed on its shores
to the sand of its deepest bottom.
-Gustave Flaubert

I cannot tell my story
without reaching a long way back.
-Hermann Hesse

Perhaps if I make myself write
I shall find out what is wrong with me.
-Dodie Smith

I know perfectly well my own egotism,
Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less.
-Walt Whitman

I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book -
that one book every writer carries within him -
the image of his own soul.
-Ignazio Silone

I write and that way rid myself of me

 and then at last I can rest.

-Clarice Lispector

She was allured by the contemplation
of the wide-mouthed old dragon, Ego.
-Unknown

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it,
is not so much to live in the past as to open it up
and get one good look at it.
-Alice Munro

What soul would hesitate to turn the universe upside down
in order to be a little more itself?
-Paul Valéry

I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man
looking up and saying "Ah!" in an encouraging way,
as if he could see something I couldn't...
then he would lean back in his chair
and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple
and tell me why...
And then, I thought, he would help me, step by step,
to be myself again.
-Sylvia Plath

Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others.
The chief part of the drama is a monologue,
or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves.
Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations,
good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations -
all these belong to our secret, 
and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible,
even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.
-Henri Frederic Amiel

Only one man ever understood me,
and he didn't understand me.
-Georg Friedrich Hegel

A man cannot make general observations to any extent,
on any subject, without betraying himself,
without introducing the entire individuality,
and presenting, as in allegory,
the fundamental theme and problem of his own existence.
-Thomas Mann

All my life,

my heart has yearned

for a thing I cannot name.

-Andre Breton

All my life, I've been waiting for my life to begin,
as if somehow my life was ahead of me,
and that someday I would arrive at it.
-Camryn Manheim

She had lived her early years
as though she were waiting for something
she might, but never did, become.
-Marguerite Duras

My whole being was seeking
for something still unknown.
-Carl Jung

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.
-Emily Dickinson

Perhaps that you're searching far too much?
That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?
-Hermann Hesse

There is that in me - I do not know what it is -
but I know it is in me.
-Walt Whitman

All I really wanted was to try and live the life
that was spontaneously welling up within me.
Why was that so very difficult?
-Hermann Hesse

I, too, remember that feeling.
You are caught between all that was
and all that must be.
You feel lost.
-Haruki Murakami

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.
-Fernando Pessoa

The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, 
as I have said,
a principal appetite of the soul.
-Aldous Huxley

We are always in search
of the redeeming formula,
the crystallizing thought.
-Etty Hillesum

The mind searches for a formula, a code of living.
The truth is you have plenty of formulas, plenty of codes,
and the absolute truth is free of it all.
-Merle Antoinette Roberson (Toni), "Gangaji"

Life cannot be forced into a system...
Man's urge to systematize,
to combine a host of contradictions into a solid structure,
is also a quest for truth.
And we do need some system...
But we must also be able to let go of it again.
-Etty Hillesum

Life cannot be captured in a few axioms.
And that is just what I keep trying to do.
-Etty Hillesum

From childhood's hour 
I have not been
As others were -
I have not seen
As others saw.
-Edgar Allen Poe

I'd woken up early,
and I took a long time getting ready to exist.
-Fernando Pessoa

At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small:
it appeared to me as a dull, trim back garden,
 in which only trivial games could be played.
-Elizabeth Bowen

Sometimes it takes darkness
and the sweet confinement
of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
-David Whyte

Everything that has anything to do
with the cult of personality
has always been painful to me.
-Albert Einstein

How glorious it is -
and also how painful -
to be an exception.
-Alfred de Musset

I love tranquil solitude

And such society

As is quiet, wise and good.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

I want to be with those
who know secret things
or else alone.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

I did not wish to live

what was not life.

-Henry David Thoreau

I have always preferred
the reflection of life
to life itself.
-Francois Truffaut

I have said no

to everything, in order to get at myself.

-Wallace Stevens

Everyone who becomes conscious
of even a fraction of his unconscious ego
gets outside his own time and social stratum
into a kind of solitude.
-Carl Jung

I've had so little practice being me
except alone
-Carolyn Mary Kleefeld

I'm more alone 

because there's more of myself to be alone with.

-Carolyn Kleefeld

I am only true when I’m alone.
-Clarice Lispector

I feel myself when I am by myself.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

It's not that I never mix with men of the world -

but really I'd rather amuse myself alone.

-Ryokan

I want to do something absolutely different,
or perhaps nothing at all:
just stay where I am, in my home,
and absorb each hour, each day, and be alone;
and read and think;
and walk about the garden in the night;
and wait, wait.
-Rosamond Lehmann

My personal hobbies
are reading, listening to music,
and silence.
-Edith Sitwell

My nature is orderly and observant
and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
-Joyce Carol Oates

By ordering things 

I create and understand at the same time.

-Clarice Lispector

People say that life is the thing,
but I prefer reading.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself
in the public library,
believing every crack in my soul
could be chinked with a book.
-Barbara Kingsolver

I wanted to live among books.
-Alberto Manguel

I didn't have much to say to anybody
but kept to myself and my books.
With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book
and draw its fragrance deep inside me.
This was enough to make me happy.
-Haruki Murakami

Only my books anoint me,

and a few friends,

those who reach into my veins.

-Anne Sexton

All I know about my life, it seems,

I have learned in books.

-Jean-Paul Sartre

My inner world
is bigger than my outer one.
-John Cage

My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior
and there is not a single word that defines it.
-Clarice Lispector

She had to live not in the passing world
but in her own deeps.
-Pearl Buck

Inside my empty bottle
I was constructing a lighthouse
while others were making ships.
-Charles Simic

Here in this lonely little room
I am master of earth and sea,
And the planets come to me.
-Arthur Symons

A sheltered life can be a daring life as  well.
For all serious daring starts from within.
-Eudora Welty

To be able to look life in the face:
that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?
 -Edith Wharton

What you can plan
is too small for you to live.
-David Whyte

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
-David Whyte

When you have chosen your part,
abide by it,
and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

You were a lonely grape
and now you are sweet wine.
There is no use in trying to become a grape again.
-Djalal ad-Din Rumi

An oak tree is an oak tree.
That is all it has to do.
If an oak tree is less than an oak tree,
then we are all in trouble.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

But where is it I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?
-Walt Whitman

We live but a fraction of our life. 

Why do we not let in the flood, 

raise the gates, and set our wheels in motion? 

-Henry David Thoreau

Follow your bliss
and the universe will open doors
where there were only walls.
-Joseph Campbell

The room is empty,

And the window is open

-Charles Simic

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
-David Whyte

I feel in my heart
all commotions and all contradictions,
the joys and sorrows of life.
-Nikos Kazantzakis

It was becoming clear to me
that what I was seeking was not a means of expression,
but the background of experience
that thoughts and feelings can only inadequately express.
-John Levy

All those years
listening to those
who had nothing to say.
-David Whyte

I don't see why it's impossible
to express everything that's on one's mind.
-Ivan Turgenev

In my mind I am eloquent;
I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings
and paint my thoughts.
But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.
-Isaac Marion

I was the shyest human ever invented,
but I had a lion in me that wouldn't shut up.
-Ingrid Bergman

You talk when you cease to be at peace
with your thoughts.
-Kahlil Gibran

I should not talk so much about myself
if there were anybody else
whom I knew so well.
-Henry David Thoreau

The more I talk
the more my inner voice is saying,
"No, that's not it at all."
-Marion Woodman

Who is this "I" that is speaking?
-Ramana Maharshi

Pure Consciousness
cannot say "I".
-Ramana Maharshi

Whenever I speak about myself
I have the feeling that I am splitting myself up.
-Etty Hillesum

Do not split your mind
in any way whatsoever.
-Imre Vallyon

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
-William Butler Yeats

Living the past is a dull and lonely business;
looking back strains the neck muscles,
causing you to bump into people not going your way.
-Edna Ferber

Reflective

I found a
weed
that had a

mirror in it
and that
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

me that
had a
weed in it.
-A. R. Ammons

By analyzing ourselves, it is said,
we shall grow even more egocentric.
Introspection leads us into all kinds of vanity,
until finally our main occupation will consist in writing a diary,
and our chief interest will lie in becoming a more exceptional case.
-Fritz Kunkel

All study of imperfection is useless;
in fact, more than useless,
because the further we delve into the darkness of the false
the further we depart from the light of the truth.
-Christian Larson

Intelligence was not intended to be used
in the study of nothingness, illusions or mistakes.
-Christian Larson

In the circle of conscious development

negation of negation is not the same as assertion.

-Arthur M. Young

On no account brood over your wrong-doing.
Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
-Aldous Huxley

Despair at our imperfection
is a greater obstacle
than the imperfection itself.
-Francois Fenelon

The sight of our imperfections
should not take away our peace.
-Francois Fenelon

Have patience with all things
but chiefly have patience with yourself.
Do not lose courage
in considering your own imperfections,
but instantly set about remedying them -
every day begin the task anew.
-Saint Francis de Sales

Simplicity is that grace
which frees the soul
from all unnecessary
reflections upon itself.
-Francois Fenelon

That little body, is, I do believe,
the greatest weight I have on my conscience.
-Nikos Kazantzkakis

I discover myself
on the verge of a usual mistake.
-Walt Whitman

All I had to do was follow my inner promptings.
Why was it so difficult?
-Hermann Hesse

Let us remember, so far as we can,
every unpleasant thought is a bad thing
literally put in the body.
-Prentice Mumford

Feed on pure ambrosia
and leave alone the indigestible things.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Always this energy smoulders inside
when it remains unlit
the body fills with dense smoke.
-David Whyte

Learn, therefore, O Mind,
to practice sympathetic love
in regard to thine own body.
-Gerhard Dorn

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
-Fernando Pessoa

Learn what your body,
Your boundary, teaches you.
-Fernando Pessoa

My great mistake,
the fault for which I can't forgive myself
is that one day
I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.
-Oscar Wilde

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind
As if my Brain had split -
I tried to match it - Seam by Seam
But could not make them fit.
-Emily Dickinson

Ten years ago
I turned my face for a moment

and it became my life.
-Anonymous

It's been a long time since I've been me.
-Fernando Pessoa

I look at myself but I'm missing.
I know myself: it's not me.
-Fernando Pessoa

I am late for my appointment with me.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present 
go on long enough?
It becomes your entire history.
-Louise Erdrich

But I've just noticed
that my mind is asleep.
-Arthur Rimbaud

I was so full of sleep at the time
that I left the true way.
-Dante Aligheiri

I sit in the center of myself
And weave busy thoughts...
Entangled in my own web,
And checked by the ephemera of self.
-Jane Steger

I was wandering around as usual,
in my unpleasantly populated subconscious.
-Dodie Smith

I existed in a world that never is -
the prison of the mind.
-Gene Tierney

I have made a captive of myself

and put me in a dungeon

and now I cannot find the key.

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

I wear the chain I forged in life...
I made it link by link, and yard by yard;
I girded it on of my own free will,
and of my own free will I wore it.
-Charles Dickens

The exterior man
may be undergoing trials,
but the interior man is quite free.
-Meister Eckhart

No knowing how he lost himself,
or how he recovered himself,
he may never feel certain
of not losing himself again.
-Charles Dickens

On account of my thoughts, 

I had left myself.

-Carl Jung

He never really found his Self
because he wanted to trap it
in the net of thoughts.
-Hermann Hesse

But mind is only a means, 
a journey and not a destination.
-Paul Wright

I could not simplify myself.
-Ivan Turgenev

My God, my God, who am I attending to?
How many am I?
Who is me?
What is this interval between me and me?
-Fernando Pessoa

What is it which has always come between real life and me?
What glass screen has, as it were, interposed itself
between me and the enjoyment, the possession, the contact of things,
leaving me only the role of the looker-on?
-Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Do I want the question
or do I want the answer?
-Hugh Prather

I seem to have run in a great circle,

and met myself again

on the starting line.

-Jeanette Winterson

How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! 
This chasing after yourself, 
craftily observing your own tracks -
in a circle, of course.
-Jens Peter Jacobsen

How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind
Around your little self and petty things?
-Aurobindo Ghose

The center that I cannot find

is known to my unconscious mind.

-W. H. Auden

And we shall not cease from our exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-T. S. Eliot

It is so easy to waste our lives:
our days, our hours, our minutes...
It is so easy to exist rather than to live.
-Anna Quindlen

Coming back to where you started
is not the same thing as never leaving.
-Terry Pratchett

The trouble is I analyze life
instead of live it.
-Hugh Prather

My life is slowed up by thought
and the need to understand what I am living.
-Anais Nin

Stuck
In the upper left hand corner
of my life
-John Sandbach

Fearing to drink

My own reflection, I ladle out

Deeper waters

-John Sandbach

I study myself
more than any other subject;
it is my metaphysic,
and my physic.
-Michel de Montaigne

To sit in a chair and analyze is heady stuff,
but it does not help you
live the power of the image.
-Marion Woodman

Nine years staring down a well
what did he achieve?
-Ikkyu Sojun

Struggling in the darkness
has never made light appear;
you have to get out of the hole you are in.
-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov

Turn your eyes more to the coming light,
and less to any immediate darkness.
-Aurobindo Ghose

Listen, are you breathing just a little,
and calling it a life?
-Mary Oliver

I don't want to end up
simply having visited this world.
-Mary Oliver

Live, so you do not have to
look back and say,
"God, how I wasted my life."
-Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross

So I have loitered my life away,
reading books, looking at pictures,
going to plays, hearing, thinking,
writing on what pleased me best.
-William Hazlitt

I have wasted my hours.
-Leonardo da Vinci

I sit brooding but hatch nothing.

-Arthur M. Young

By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
-Arthur Rimbaud

I have walked in the meadows of green
grieving for my life.
-Ivan Turgenev

Live with no time out.
-Simone de Beauvoir

As you walk and eat and travel,
be where you are.
Otherwise you miss most of your life.
-Buddha

Somewhere, we think, there must be joy.
It can't be all  must and ought and have to.
When the crunch comes,
we have to realize the truth: we weren't there.
-Marion Woodman

I have been trying for some time
to develop a lifestyle
that does not require my presence.
-Garry Trudeau

Where art thou
when thou art not with thyself?
-Thomas a Kempis

If I never become what I was meant to be,
but always remain what I am not,
I shall spend eternity contradicting myself
by being at once something and nothing.
-Thomas Merton

Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be...
when all I want is out there, waiting for me
the minute I say I know who I am.
-Arthur Miller

Oh, you weak, beautiful people
who give up with such grace.
What you need is someone to take hold of you -
gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.
-Tennessee Williams

How do I explain that my greatest fear
is precisely in relation to...to being?
-Clarice Lispector

No man has ever been entirely and completely himself.
Yet each one strives to become that -
one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way,
each as best he can.
-Hermann Hesse

The life of every man is a diary
in which he means to write one story, 
and writes another;
and his humblest hour 
is when he compares the volume as it is
with what he vowed to make it.
-James M. Barrie

We live counterfeit lives
in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.
-Andre Gide

One's real life is so often the life
that one does not lead.
-Oscar Wilde

You gave your life 
to become the person you are right now.
Was it worth it?
-Richard Bach

All that we are not
stares back at what we are.
-W. H Auden

I want to be able, as days go by,

always to look myself straight in the eye.

-Edgar Guest

If I only had the courage
to think all that I know.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I want to know if I can live with what I know,
and with only that.
-Albert Camus

What are you pretending
not to know?
-Anonymous

I have made myself less powerful,
concealed my power.
-Anais Nin

Perhaps I am stronger that I think.
Perhaps I am afraid of my strength,
and turn it against myself to make myself weak.
Perhaps I am most afraid of the strength of God in me.
-Thomas Merton

Your playing small serves no one.
-Marianne Williamson

We are not helping anyone
when we pretend to feel less,
have less, or be less than we are.
-Geneen Roth

Those who gave away their wings
are sad not to see them fly.
-Antonio Porchia

Oh, the lies I have told
to my own energies!
-Theodore Roethke

You are unique,
and if that is not fulfilled
then something has been lost.
-Martha Graham

There is something in me maybe someday to be written;
now it is folded, and folded, and folded,
like a note in school.
-Sharon Olds

There is no greater agony
than bearing an untold story inside you.
-Maya Angelou

If a story is in you,
it's got to come out.
-William Faulkner

You are the storyteller of your own life,
and you can create your own legend, or not.
-Isabel Allende

The only thing keeping you from what you want
is your story about why you can't have it.
-Anthony Robbins

Can you be the person
you have always denied?
-Marion Woodman

At any moment
I could start being a better person -
but what moment should I choose?
-Ashleigh Brilliant

She kept going: why put it off? 

Yes, why put it off? she asked herself. 

And her question was solid, 

demanding a serious answer.

-Clarice Lispector

If we wait for the moment
when everything, absolutely everything is ready,
we shall never begin.
-Ivan Turgenev

He who postpones
the hour of living rightly
is like the rustic
who waits for the river to run out
before he crosses.
-Horace

I am an abyss I am trying to cross.
-W. S. Merwin

Maybe I will find the answer...tomorrow.
Perhaps it depends on how "hungry" I become.
-William Corlett

And tomorrow,
what shall tomorrow bring
to the over-prudent dog
burying bones in the trackless sand
as he follows the pilgrims to the holy city?
-Kahlil Gibran

The day after tomorrow I'll be different,
My life will triumph,
All of my real qualities of intelligence, erudition, and practicality
Will be convened by official announcement,
But by an announcement to be made tomorrow...

The day after tomorrow I'll be different,
My life will triumph,
All of my real qualities of intelligence, erudition and practicality
Will be convened by an official announcement,
But by an announcement to be made tomorrow. . . .
-Fernanado Pessoa

Perhaps I am doomed
to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring,
doomed to try and learn
what I should simply recognize,
learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
-Andre Breton

What happens to a dream deferred?
-Langston Hughes

The song that I came to sing
remains unsung to this day.
I have spent my days in stringing
and unstringing my instrument.
-Rabindranath Tagore

How clearly I have seen my condition,
yet how childishly I have acted.
How clearly I still see it,
and yet show no sign of improvement.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sometimes even I can't believe
how wishy-washy I am.
-Charles Schultz

To be always intending to live a life,
but never to decide to set about it,
this is as if a man should put off
eating, drinking and sleeping
from one day to another
until he is starved and destroyed.
-John Tillotson

A man without decision of character
can never be said to belong to himself.
-John Foster

By ignoring your Atman,
you have destroyed the grandeur of your life.
With whom are you now going to lodge a complaint?
-Jnanesvara

I have now spent fifty-five years in resolving;
having, from the earliest times almost that I can remember,
been forming schemes of a better life.
I have done nothing.
The need of doing, therefore is pressing,
since the time of doing is short.
O God, grant me to resolve aright,
and to keep my resolution.
-Samuel Johnson

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: not all your Piety not Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
-Omar Khayyam

What am I doing
at the level of consciousness
where this is real?
-Thaddeus Golas

Each level of our being
has its own heaven and its own hell.
-Satprem

Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth 
without running into extremes;
we have frequently to exhaust the part of error,  or even of folly,
before we work our way up 
to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom.
-Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

In creative experience a  true ascent 
necessarily involves at the same time a true descent.
Each is an exact measure of the other.
We are not at one with heaven
until we are also perfectly reconciled to hell.
-Hugh l'Anson Fausset

As we soar, we also need to sink.
-Hugh l'Anson Fausset

There are times when we must sink 
to the bottom of our misery to understand truth,
just as we must descend to the bottom of a well 
to see the stars in broad daylight.
-Vaclav Havel

Man must descend the spiral
of his own absurdity to the lowest point;
only then can he look beyond it.
-Vaclav Havel

I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.
-R. S. Thomas

For a tree's branches to reach to heaven,
Its roots must reach to hell.
-Medieval Dictum

I know the bottom, she says.
I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
-Sylvia Plath

You don't go through a deep personal transformation
without some kind of dark night of the soul.
-Sam Keen

It always comes back to the same necessity:
go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
-May Sarton

It is by going down into the abyss
that we recover the treasure of life.
Where you stumble,
there lies your treasure.
-Joseph Campbell

Ah, what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
-R. S. Thomas

Once you have explored the depths,
don't wallow in them.
-Marion Woodman

You are your own obstacle -
rise above yourself.
-Hafiz

I am always with myself,
and it is I
who am my tormentor.
-Leo Tolstoy

My tormentor is myself
left over from yesterday.
-Deepak Chopra

We are our own dragons
as well as our own heroes
and we have to rescue ourselves 
from ourselves.
-Tom Robbins

Why am I always at war with myself?
-Charles Dickens

Thought must be divided against itself
before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
-Aldous Huxley

Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When you play chess alone 

it's always your move.

-Charles Simic

Oh make in me
those civil wars to cease.
-Sir Philip Sidney

I am iron resisting
the most powerful magnet there is.
-Djalal ad-Din Rumi

It is eternal law
that man cannot be redeemed
by a power external to himself.
-Helena P. Blavatsky

Emancipate yourself!...
No one else will,
because no one else can.
-Henry Miller

I am very much aware
of my own double self.
-Ingmar Bergman

My dilemma is
to force the two poles of life together,
to transcribe the dual voices into life's melody.
-Herman Hesse

Self-contradiction is the only wrong.
-Friedrich von Schiller

Who would not say that it is the essence of folly...
to impel the body one way and the soul another,
to be split between the most conflicting motions?
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca

This plant would like to grow
And yet be embryo.
-Peter Ustinov

One can't
have it

both ways
and both

ways is
the only

way I
want it.
-A. R. Ammons

Wherever I go,
there he is.
He is no other than my self,
but I am not him.
-Dosan

Myself, arch-traitor to myself.
-Christina Rosetti

Saw the mirrors in two.
I'm a divided man.
-Theodore Roethke

I am but half,

who would be whole.

-Theodore Roethke

Every man, in reality, is two men.
the man he is, and the man he could be.
-Earl Nightingale

In a profound sense every man has two halves to his being;
he is not one person
so much as two persons trying to act in unison.
-Laurens van der Post

All day I have been two people -
the me imprisoned in yesterday
and the me out here on the mound;
and now there's a third me trying to get in -
the me in what is going to happen next.
-Dodie Smith

Are there two entities
in the human body?
Yes and No.
They seem two,
but they become one.
-Paramananda

Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect, and the beast and the monk,
robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
-E. M. Forster

We are made out of wholeness;
all our boundaries are Janus-faced.
-Bruce Burger

Everything in me that conspires
to break the unity and continuity of my life
conspires to destroy me and consequently itself.
-Miguel de Unamuno

The phrase "to pull oneself together"
means to set that part of life to work
which may be called spirit.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

We do not realize our potential
by dividing our personality
into warring and conflicting elements
and by preserving eternal tension between them.
We realize our potential
by bringing forth the wholeness of our being.
-Haridas Chaudhuri

He who attends to his greater Self
becomes a great man;
he who attends to his smaller self
becomes a small man.
-Mencius

We find ourselves by losing
that which we have called ourselves.
-Vernon Howard

One must lose one's little lower self
to find the greater self.
-Aurobindo Ghose

It is by denying one's little self,
the false self which covers one's real self
in which the essence of divine Being is to be found.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

If you realize what the problem is - losing yourself -
you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.
-Joseph Campbell

The attainment of wholeness
requires one to stake one's whole being.
-Carl Jung

And now my grief I see
Was but that ancient shadow part of me,
Not yet attuned to good,
Still blind and senseless in its warring mood,
I turn from it and climb
To the heroic spirit of the prime,
The light that well foreknew
All the dark ways that it must journey through.
-George William Russell

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.
-David Whyte

I shall gather myself into myself again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one.
I shall fuse them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.
-Sara Teasdale

The arrow always fails the mark -
will never enter -
if it is I who takes the aim
instead of That which is my center.
-Angelus Silesius

Part of me is dying
maybe to let the rest of me come to life.
-Stephen Levine

I want to unfold,
I don't want to stay folded anywhere,
Because where I am folded,
There I am a lie.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

I am a butterfly.
I am not a butterfly collector.
I want the experience of the butterfly.
-William Stafford

"How does one becomes a butterfly?" she asked pensively.
"You must want to fly so much
that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar."
-Trina Paulus

It is only when caterpillarness is done
that one becomes a butterfly...
You can't rip away caterpillarness.
-Ram Dass

And the day came
when the risk to remain tight in the bud
was more painful
than the risk it took to blossom.
-Anais Nin

I am finally coming out of a chrysalis.
The years behind me
seem strangely inert and negative,
but I suppose that my passivity was necessary.
Now the pain and struggle of fighting my way out
into something new and much bigger.
I must see and embrace God in the whole world.
-Thomas Merton

We delight in the beauty of a butterfly
but rarely admit the change
it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
-Maya Angelou

In my end is my beginning.
-T. S. Eliot

And it is time to go,
To bid farewell
To one's own self, and find an exit
From the fallen self.
-D. H. Lawrence

Stand up and walk out of your history.
-Phil McGraw

Forget how you came to this gate, your history.
Let that be as if it had not been.
-Hakim Sanai

One day, 
I discovered I didn't need personal history,
so...I dropped it.
-Carlos Castaneda

A story?
No. No stories, never again.
-Maurice Blanchot

I have always known
that at last I would take this road
but yesterday I did not know it would be today.
-Narihara

I will not walk backward in life.
-J. R. R. Tolkien

I can't go back to yesterday

because I was a different person then.

-Lewis Carroll

I am not now
That which I have been.
-George Gordon Noel Byron

What I am is no more!
I bid myself farewell.
-Theodore Roethke

I throw my past behind me like a rose,
Worn threadbare in the seams, and out of date.
I have outgrown it.
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you.

I am dead.

-Jean Cocteau

I have finished my combat
with the sun.
-Wallace Stevens

A world ends when its metaphor has died.
-Archibald MacLeish

The need for change
bulldozed a road
down the center of my mind.
-Maya Angelou

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.
-David Whyte

Therefore, dark past,
I'm about to do it.
I'm about to forgive you

for everything.
-Mary Oliver

I forgive myself for having believed so long that...
I was never good enough to have, get, be what I wanted.
-Ceanne DeRohan

Take all the faults I have committed,
take them all, accept them, efface them
so that these forces may disappear.
-Mirra Alfassa, "The Mother"

Wash away, Waters,
whatever sin is in me,
what wrong I have done,
what imprecation I have uttered,
and what untruth I have spoken.
-Rig Veda

Rinse away in shower of light

This cover of dirt I hide mySelf with!

Awaken that which lies in deep slumber within me

With a gentle touch of thy golden morning Sun!

-Rabindranath Tagore

With all my heart,
and in the tongue which is
One in all men, I offered God my soul
As a burnt offering for this new bliss.
-Dante Alighieri

She said...
I will not sacrifice myself
on Ego's Altar,
but rather celebrate
the beauty we are.
-Melanie Gendron

Amidst my anguish over who I am
A thought lifts its brow straight up,
Like a tower. In the vast solitude
Of a soul all alone it's as if
My heart possessed knowledge and a brain.
-Fernando Pessoa

I hear it in the deep heart's core.
-William Butler Yeats

This is dead center, I am the one

Who holds it in myself, the one who sees

And can contain ocean and sky and sun

-May Sarton

I, alchemist of myself.
-Clarice Lispector

Watching the moon
at dawn,
solitary, mid-sky,
I knew myself completely,
no part left out.
-Izumi Shikibu

The veil of self-indulgence
was rent from head to foot.
I saw my life as a whole.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

I have a clear view of 12 years of history of my inner self.
First the cramped self, that self with big blinkers,
then the disappearance of the blinkers, and the self,
and now gradually the reemergence of a self without blinkers.
-Paul Klee

A freshness lives deep in me
which no one can take from me
not even I myself -
-Gunnar Ekelof

The Sunrise kissed my Chrysalis -
And I stood up  - and lived -
-Emily Dickinson

Come, butterfly
It's late -
We've miles to go together.
-Matuso Basho

The strongest and sweetest songs
yet remain to be sung.
-Walt Whitman