Robert Fulghum Quotes

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.

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.

You cannot be the person they know and the great, glorious person you want to become. Not at the same time.

It is not enough to do, one must also become. I wish to be wiser, stronger, better. This--" I held out my hands "--this thing that is me is incomplete. It is only the raw material with which I have to work. I want to make it better than I received it.

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.

I am turning into the person I knew I would.

One thing about me is that I'm very much like the Black Madonna. I love to reinvent myself and that's because I am a very free person.

People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.

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. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

The struggle to excavate your true, authentic self from beneath the mountain of conditioning and ridiculous expectation is the epic struggle of your lifetime.

The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself.

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.

I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept in my life, all the things I would no longer tolerate, and all the things that I aspired to becoming.

There is no greater valor nor no sterner fight. He who would be what he ought to be must stop being what he is.

The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

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.

There has to be a balance, Vin," Elend said. "Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be." He sighed. "But for now," he said, nodding to the side, "we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.

i can become a new woman every day until i like the woman i become, then i can become her for a while, if not forever!

I've become the person I've always hated, but I'm happier.

The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.

I wanted to be a certain kind of woman. I became that kind of woman.