Understanding of oneself is the first act in establishing a transformative philosophy for living a vivid and a reflective existence. Knowing thy self is essential to designing and instigating a meaningful life that is self-directed instead of exclusively controlled by innate traits and external determinates.
Topic
self-determination
/self-determination-quotes-and-sayings
Topic Summary
About the self-determination quote collection
The self-determination page groups 457 quotes under one canonical topic hub so readers and answer engines can cite a stable source instead of fragmented search results.
Topic Feed
Quotes filed under self-determination
There is no pre-mapped intellectual topology path leading to truth. Truth is a process of conducting a searching investigatory dialogue with oneself in an attempt to examine and discern the contents of a person__ own mind. Every person must ask himself or herself what is essential in life.
Life has a tendency to provide a person with what they need in order to grow. Our beliefs, what we value in life, provide the roadmap for the type of life that we experience. A period of personal unhappiness reveals that our values are misplaced and we are on the wrong path. Unless a person changes their values and ideas, they will continue to experience discontentment.
Character modification requires active participation in challenging new experiences, but without reflection upon our encounters in life and the purposeful alteration in our base philosophy new experiences alone will not result in core personality changes. Our thoughts become our habits, and our habits reveal our character. Only by thinking and acting differently will a person attain the quality of character that they seek.
True joy comes from operating with Inner-directedness and recognizing who you are.
Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want__sn't that life itself? And who__n this damned universe__ho can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want?
Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.