Willa Cather Quotes

I discovered myself!

I caught up on a lot of just domestic normal everyday stuff, and grew up a lot, and went to therapy, and did a lot of contemplating and figuring things out. I needed to just strip everything away and figure out who I am and get to know myself, as cheesy as that sounds.

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

I lived my life one way for 35 years, for me. And then the focus came in on what I really was.

I think I surprise myself.

I stepped away to find out more about myself, which I was having difficulty doing as a football player. I got a chance to travel the world. I studied Eastern philosophy, and I've grown as a person so much.

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.

We have to have a very clear understanding of ourselves.

It's very important for people to know what gives them meaning. But it's hard for people to figure out if you're not connecting with yourself and taking the time to just be introspective and daydream.

I hit a brick wall one day, and I spent a lot of time by myself learning about me and who I am and what I want and don't want.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

Its never too late to take a moment to look.

Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

I hoped that the trip would be the best of all journeys: a journey into ourselves.

You can’t change what you haven’t realized yet. Once you realize what you were asleep to, the change happens on its own.

This is the key to life: the ability to reflect, the ability to know yourself, the ability to pause for a second before reacting automatically. If you can truly know yourself, you will begin the journey of transformation.

Knowing what you admire in others is a wonderful mirror into your deepest, as yet unborn, self.

There's no journey worth taking except the journey through one's self. That's the most important journey you take. I found that out as I went around the world many times: I was learning about me.

Life flies by, and it's easy to get lost in the blur. In adolescence, it's 'How do I fit in?' In your 20s, it's 'What do I want to do?' In your 30s, 'Is this what I'm meant to do?' I think the trick is living the questions. Not worrying so much about what's ahead but rather sitting in the grey area - being OK with where you are.

I think and that is all that I am.

We have to really educate ourselves in a way about who we are, what our real identity is.

To travel is to take a journey into yourself.