Self Revelation Quotes

• Self-knowledge involves relationship. To know oneself is to study one self in action with another person. Relationship is a process of self evaluation and self revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.

  Bruce Lee

  Mirrors, Self, Evaluation

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• All good work requires self-revelation.

  Sidney Lumet

  Hard Work, Self, Good Work

  Sidney Lumet (2010). “Making Movies”, p.59, Vintage

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• It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Character, Self

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• Self-revelation is a cruel process. The real picture, the real you never emerges. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to know how you really look. Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces.

  Shashi Deshpande

  Real, Mirrors, Self

  Shashi Deshpande (1989). “That Long Silence”, p.1, Penguin Books India

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• The ugly duckling is a misunderstood universal myth. It's not about turning into a blonde Barbie doll or becoming what you dream of being; it's about self-revelation, becoming who you are.

  Baz Luhrmann

  Dream, Becoming Who You Are, Ugly Duckling

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• How can we know ourselves by ourselves? . . . Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount.

  James Hillman

  Love, Inspirational, Relationship

  James Hillman (1972). “The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology”, p.92, Northwestern University Press

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• The mind grows by self revelation. In play the child ascertains what he can do, discovers his possibilities of will and thought by exerting his power spontaneously. In work he follows a task prescribed for him by another, and doesn't reveal his own proclivities and inclinations; but another's. In play he reveals his own original power.

  Friedrich Frobel

  Children, Self, Play

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• It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised.

  Anthony Daniels

  Self, Age, Use

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• The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .

  Audre Lorde

  Self, Silence, Action

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.42, Crossing Press

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• you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

  Susan Cain

  Writing, Mean, Night

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• Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Wisdom, Philosophy

  Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Kerst, Henry Edward Krehbiel (1964). “Beethoven, the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words”, p.13, Courier Corporation

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• Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique - these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation .

  Ansel Adams

  Art, Self, Design

  Ansel Adams, Nancy Wynne Newhall, M.H. De Young Memorial Museum (1963*). “Ansel Adams, photographs 1923-1963”

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• Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.

  Bruce Lee

  Mirrors, Over You, Self Evaluation

  Bruce Lee (2015). “Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living”, p.181, Tuttle Publishing

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• Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in our hearts. Like the poet's image of a church bell that reveals its latent music only when struck, or a dragonfly that flames forth its beauty only in flight, so does the content of a human heart lie buried until action calls it forth. The greatest act of self-revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is and knowing that a thing is not.

  Terryl L. Givens

  Lying, Believe, Heart

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• In anthropology, which historically exists to 'give voice' to others, there is no greater taboo than self-revelation. The impetus of our discipline, with its roots in Western fantasies about barbaric others, has been to focus primarily on 'cultural' rather than 'individual' realities. The irony is that anthropology has always been rooted in an 'I' - understood as having a complex psychology and history - observing a 'we' that, until recently, was viewed as plural, ahistorical, and nonindividuated.

  Ruth Behar

  Reality, Voice, Roots

  Ruth Behar (2014). “The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart”, p.26, Beacon Press

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• The greatest act of self-revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not.

  Terryl L. Givens

  Believe, Self, Knowing

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• The value of the Old Testament may be dependant on what seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way-to find the Word in it...to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God's gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works.

  C. S. Lewis

  Bible, Biblical, Self

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• Daily life is a comprimised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism, and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence.

  E. O. Wilson

  Self, Class, Identity

  "On Human Nature". Book by E. O. Wilson, 1978.

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• For a justice of this ultimate tribunal [the U.S. Supreme Court], the opportunity for self-discovery and the occasion for self-revelation is great.

  Abe Fortas

  Opportunity, Discovery, Self

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• Theology is a serious quest for the true knowledge of God, undertaken in response to His self-revelation, illumined by Christian tradition, manifesting a rational inner coherence, issuing in ethical conduct, resonating with the contemporary world and concerned for the greater glory of God.

  John Stott

  Christian, Self, World

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• The traditional gender ideals of the strong-silent man who plays his cards close to his chest and the mysterious woman who disguises her feelings with coyness go so far as to make a virtue of being unavailable and secretive. But wholehearted intimacy can develop only where two people are equally forthcoming and self-revelatory. To take the risk of loving, we must become vulnerable enough to test the radical proposition that knowledge of another and self-revelation will ultimately increase rather than decrease love. It is an awe-ful risk.

  Sam Keen

  Strong, Men, Two

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• You know, I think everybody I've seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it's very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They're not really interested in the person, he doesn't relate to the person. All these things I've written so much about. That's why I've made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Book, Home, Writing

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• [Europe has] this tradition of self revelation in popular music. We have it here - it's called Country Western Music... I think that's where the deeper and more complex subjects are treated.

  Leonard Cohen

  Country, Thinking, Self

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• My works are about light in the sense that light is present and there; the work is made of light. It's not about light or a record of it, but it is light. Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself revelation.

  James Turrell

  Light, Records, Revelations

  James Turrell, Julia Brown, Craig E. Adcock, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.) (1985). “Occluded front, James Turrell”, Lapis Pr

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• I've never been much for self-revelation. In two decades of public life, I always approached the limelight with extreme caution. Not that I kept my personal life off-limits; rather, the personal life I put on display was a blend of fact and fiction.

  James McGreevey

  Self, Two, Fiction

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