Billy Collins Quotes

It's more important to know your weaknesses than your strengths.

I tell the truth, and I expose myself as a weak, misguided, misdirected, dysfunctional human being I used to be.

The only journey is the one within.

Gail Sheehy tells us that "the delights of self-discovery are always available." All Fools' Day is the perfect day to engrave this wisdom in our hearts.

A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that - it made me really cry, I was so grateful.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.

If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self.

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.

It's funny because sometimes one doesn't actually consider these things for one's self until one's in a situation like this press conferece where one has to kind of think about it.

I found from working on the film that I am a bigot, at times. And that I am also a coward, at times.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

You have no need to travel anywhere - journey within yourself. Enter a mine of rubies and bathe in the splendor of your own light.

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.

How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

If someone is self-aware, then they can always continue to grow. If they're not self-aware, I think it's harder for them to evolve or adapt beyond who they already are.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.

Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.

There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.

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.

Looking at my life was very difficult. I think I learned that I haven't been as good a person as I'm inclined to think of myself as. I haven't been as good friend, haven't been as good a person, made a lot of mistakes.

Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations - projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves- and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.

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.