Jacqueline Winspear Quotes

I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am.

Every one of us at some point in our lives has had the struggle with identity.

There are some of us who think to ourselves, 'If I had only been there! How quick I would have been to help the Baby. I would have washed His linen. How happy I would have been to go with the shepherds to see the Lord lying in the manger!' Why don't we do it now? We have Christ in our neighbor.

When you engage in fulfilling the needs of others, your own needs are fulfilled as a by-product.

I could imagine myself becoming one of Marla's stories.

I think my whole living in vain involves me. I know that the biggest help for me is to help someone else in so many different ways.

They ignore what is deep and true to a man's heart, his real passions, and simply try to shape him up through various forms of pressure.

Your greatest adversary is also your greatest teacher. Like it or not, it is the job of certain people to bring out the worst in you. What they trigger is already in you. They are here to reveal the sore, tender wounded places in your heart and mind, and they are providing you with a wonderful and divine opportunity for healing.

I wonder how I seem to them. They must see someone I don't see. Someone capable and strong. Someone I can't be; someone I can be.

This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there's a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it's very much finding my own place.

Having done a normal job for 10 years, as a psychiatric nurse dealing with emergencies, I know what terrible, hopeless lives some people have. So in many ways, it's great to be able to wield the financial power that I can, and do gigs, fundraisers or give money. I feel lucky I can help out.

I don't entirely approve of some of the things I have done, or am, or have been. But I'm me. God knows, I'm me.

Whatever this feeling is - this is what I have been praying for. And this is also what I have been praying to.

I've gone through a lot of different phases on what I do and why I do it - morally and ethically. I've tortured myself about it, especially in dealing with success and money.

I'm going to pull myself together for a while and think-try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don't know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am. I must think about it.

It was time to expect more of myself. Yet as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously -- and also more seriously. I wanted to use my time well, but I also wanted to wander, to play, to read at whim. I wanted to think about myself so I could forget myself. I was always on the edge of agitation; I wanted to let go of envy and anxiety about the future, yet keep my energy and ambition.

None but God would ever have thought of justifying me. I am a wonder to myself.

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us

I don't want to be lofty when I say this, but I don't know what a success is any more. I know how we define it, but that was a moment where I went, "Wait, who am I?" You could feel the business, in particular, kind of go "He's all right, let's go over here." I started to go, "Wait, I know why I love to do this." I think I got off track in why I love to do it.

If we stop thinking of ourselves and only of helping others, you will start to see a dramatic improvement in the suffering we are all going through.

There was no himself in himself.

I have no more idea now of who I am than I did before. But at least I know that. And I'm starting to figure out who I want to be.

Everything that's happened has brought me here, to this place, with this knife in my hand, and something worth saving.