We come back to the same people to learn something about how we have changed. We want to be assured that we have changed. We so want our pictures to paint differently than they do.

and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.

Shouldn't we rather recognize that each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all epochs of man; and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs?

The fact that both ego and self say "I" is a source of confusion and misidentification. The well-informed ego says truly, "I am what I know myself to be." The self says merely, "I am.

Just as the sea is an open and ever flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming.

The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows

To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude towards Afrika becomes more positive, your understanding of and attitude towards yourself will also becomes more positive...

Never try to do anything that is outside of who you are. A forced smile is a sign of what feels wrong in your heart, so recognize it when it happens. Living a lie will reduce you to one.

It is one thing to understand the gospel but is quite another to experience the gospel in such a way that it fundamentally changes us and becomes the source of our identity and security.

When I turn my mind's eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things...

Our work is not to become unique. We are unique. Our work is to unleash our sense of adventure and to allow the inner whisper that says “come hither” to be reason enough to go.

Every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances, and sometimes these loyalties conflict with one another and confront the person who harbors them with difficult choices

For so many years, for so long, I have been so many things, so many different men. But here," he said, so softly I could barely hear him, "here in the dark, with you… I have no name.

People must come to the understanding that they do not have a fixed identity. They have the power to identify and alter features of their personalities that they find negative or unpleasant.

I am myself when I get up, I am myself throughout the day and I am myself when I go back to sleep, you probably might have met someone else when I was asleep and claimed it to be changed me.