John Fowles Quotes

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

Before you can do something you must first be something.

Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.

What we earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are.

I understood that I am a lot bigger than what I do, that I have a bigger potential.

There's who you think you are and who you want to be, and then who you actually are.

I have always felt like I was just sort of waiting to catch up to the rest of myself.

What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.

I think a lot of people are drawn to seeing people that want to be better. We see it in ourselves.

The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it.

It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.

I think every individual has his or her own power, and it's a matter of working, taking time and defining what that power is.

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

I sometimes truly despair at ever being meaningfully altered and affected by the things I claim are so important to me.

The greatest thing is, at any moment, to be willing to give up who we are in order to become all that we can be.

As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self-understanding, and this is something that can't be taught.

We may win when we lose, if we have done what we can; for by so doing we have made real at least some part of that finished product in whose fabrication we are most concerned: ourselves.

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.

I want to be a better Chris Quinn. I don't want to be a different Chris Quinn.

Human improvement is from within outward.

I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

Every intense desire is perhaps a desire to be different from what we are.

As a human being, I'm work in process.

I always thought of myself as a later bloomer, so I like some of my work more later than earlier.