Parker Palmer Quotes

The greatest discovery in life is self-discovery. Until you find yourself you will always be someone else. Become yourself.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that's not easy.

I believe that self-discovery is an ongoing thing.

For it is easy to criticize and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes a lifetime.

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

What are we taking from people and what do we give is a life-long struggle, I think, for most of us. Who are we? Do we like who we are? Do we know who we are? Do we care? Does anyone care? That's such a big topic. I could tackle that in many movies. So could other people.

People are like, 'Be yourself, be yourself,' and I'm still trying to figure out who that is. I know I'm not perfect, but I know I have a lot of people that support me and love me, and I don't want to let anyone down, so I just try to be the best that I can be.

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life.

The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.

Discover yourself, otherwise you have to depend on other people's opinions who don't know themselves.

Sometimes when we awaken from the bad dream of disowning ourselves, we think that the sojourn to self-discovery is a new one. But it is an ancient quest.

Wouldn't have no knowledge of wealth, without no knowledge of self.

It takes time to understand yourself, to go inside yourself and to question yourself and really take yourself to task. That's self-expression.

I think it's important to know yourself before you try to deal with a relationship.

I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.

One of the greatest moments in anybody's developing experience is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is.

I've been through so much of my own self-search that I'm not as consumed with who I am as I used to be.

Self-exploration is very painful, but unless you do that, you will never know who you are and who you want to be.

The real rub is finding that authentic self and it's not something that's going to come to you overnight.

It took me a while to find myself.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self.

I really do feel like I know myself, and I'm so happy to be by myself and I'm so happy to be with other people; I just know myself really, really well, and I think that is an amazing thing. I think a lot of people don't know themselves that well.

I'm not crazy. But I am different. I'm still learning about myself.

You have to lose yourself to find yourself.

A psychologist said to me, there are only two important questions you have to ask yourself. What do you really feel? And, what do you really want? If you can answer those two, you probably can leave your neuroses behind you.