Mary McCarthy Quotes

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.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.

I think between the ages of 15 and 32, don't worry about getting married, don't worry about settling down, don't worry about having a baby. Give birth to yourself.

I think at some point during everyone's life, you finally figure yourself out. I haven't even done that yet. I'm still learning who I am.

I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.

I think that the older you get, the more you become your true, essential self. You find the things that make you happy. You whittle away the parts of yourself that mean less to you.

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.

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

Concepts vs. self-actualization. - Instead of dedicating your life to actualize a concept of what you should be like, ACTUALIZE YOURSELF. The process of maturing does not mean to become a captive of conceptualization. It is to come to the realization of what lies in our innermost selves.

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

I am turning into the person I knew I would.

It's not about finding a home so much as finding yourself.

The purpose of life is to explore one's own life to its fullest, to explore all dimensions.

Everything you do tends to make you accomplish another step on the road to complete yourself.

You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.

The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create, and evolve into who we know ourselves to be. It’s okay if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world.

it takes a lot of rehearsal to become yourself.

Every time I make another record and every time I get a year older, I become more and more confident in who I am and more in tune with what I want as a person. I think it's the same for anyone in any walk of life. You just grow with experience and become more confident in exploring new things.

I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.

Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.

The search for total knowledge starts from the Self and finds its fulfillment in coming back to the Self, finding that everything is the expression of the Self - everything is the expression of my own Self.

A child should be allowed to take as long as she needs for knowing everything about herself, which is the same as learning to be herself. Even twenty-five years if necessary, or even forever. And it wouldn't matter if doing things got delayed, because nothing is really important but being oneself.

The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation. You are not discovering yourself, but creating yourself anew. Seek therefore, not to find out Who You Are, but seek to determine Who You Want to Be.

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.