Getting in touch with your true self must be your first priority.

I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense I call it intelligence.

I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.

There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within. More inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self.

Whatever glory belongs to the race for a development unprecedented in history for the given length of time a full share belongs to the womanhood of the race.

One's self-image is very important because if that's in good shape then you can do anything or practically anything.

Perhaps middle age is or should be a period of shedding shells the shell of ambition the shell of material accumulations and possessions the shell of the ego.

Only so far as a man believes strongly mightily can he act cheerfully or do anything worth doing.

Who you are is a necessary step to being who you will be.

The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there - you build yourself. Those are the high ones the thick ones the ones with no doors in.

Our entire life ... consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.

Every man must at last accept himself for his portion and learn to do his work with the tools and talents with which he has been endowed.

There is no balking genius. Only death can silence it or hinder.

Next to God we are indebted to women first for life itself and then for making it worth living.

From without no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves unless some interior responding wonder meets it.

That was with me for years - feeling I wasn't myself. And I do think I wasn't my real self then. Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking...

When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

When I said, "I am my mother, but I'm not," I was saying my path would be my own.

A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don't want to see. If we refuse to face our shadow, it will...

It was one of those moments-which sometimes occur only at the interval of years-when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself...

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

If you've got it, flaunt it. And if you don't got it? Flaunt it. 'Cause what are we even doing here if we're not flaunting it?

But even them, my pains, I understand ill. That must come from my not being all pain and nothing else. There's the rub. Then they recede, or I, till they fill me with amaze and wonder, seen from a...

To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.

To be always what I am - and so changed from what I was.

You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

If you're hoping for salvation or whatever, it has very little merit in it. I was referring to the final battle on the threshold of eternal darkness, with oneself the only witness.

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal...

She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed rash and sweeping to...