Self Revelation Quotes

“Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932

“All good work requires self-revelation.”
― Sidney Lumet, Making Movies

“Relationship is understanding. It is a process of self-revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself -- to be is to be related.”
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

“Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”
― Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

“When people know you too well, they eventually see your damage, your weirdness, carelessness, and mean streak. They see how ordinary you are after all, that whatever it was that distinguished you in the beginning is the least of who you actually are. This will turn out to be the greatest gift we can offer another person: letting them see, every so often, beneath all the trappings and pretense to the truth of us.”
― Anne Lamott, Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage

“...there are certain things we can't erase, certain things that we reveal to the people closest to us despite what we may or may not know we are telling them.

[Hannah Hall]”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“Don't wait for the law of attraction to happen to you; make it happen for you, by taking action. Once you do this, you will experience the law of revelation.”
― Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain - The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life

“There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“You cannot say something about something without revealing something about yourself.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“You think you know yourself, the world. You believe you've got a bead on everybody else's bullshit, but what about your own?”
― Sam Lipsyte, The Fun Parts

“Family members can find their siblings incomprehensible because they assume that given their genetic and environmental commonality their siblings should comport themselves in a similar manner. Although we each know all the key events of one another lives, being siblings still allows for a chasm of unknown, misinterpretation, and misunderstanding. We all need a degree of privacy and that we only share with other people including esteemed family members select parts of ourselves. We each hold back revealing part of ourselves, but most of us are uncomfortable if we think other people and especially our spouses or close family members harbor furtive thoughts.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“God is no wise a safety net for the blind. He’s not someone to be commanded to peform magic tricks, or forced into Self-relvelation – not even by His own Son.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos / How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World / Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Think Rich to Get Rich

“Letting people know you too well is like the commercial for a telephone company with the hapless person trying to find decent reception: 'Can you hear me now?' Our bitter, hard, screwed-up places spool out over time in a marriage or intimate relationship. Our crazy inside-person shows.”
― Anne Lamott, Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage

“We must judge our idealistic self in the harsh daylight of our concrete deeds. It is the fragments from unanticipated moments in life – suffering, sadness, and fearfulness – when quixotically strung together that ultimately divulge us. Unexpected encounters in the world, especially when fate sideswipes us, reveal our core persona. With the residue garnered from a pastiche of unpleasant moments, we winnow out who we would prefer to be from who we actually are. Conflict, crisis, tragedy, and pathos force us to address whom we in reality contritely mushroomed into becoming.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“But to censor it would be tantamount to a kind of doctoring. I would be just as guilty of a normative version of the past as the charans and their ilk. And not to write at all would mean that i, too, believes that truth was a good slogan but not to be confronted in the corridors of real life.”
― Kiran Nagarkar, Cuckold

“The picture of a being is always a schema, a simplified and crude depiction of what is never entirely representable and exhaustible; such a being seeks to be understood in its potentiality and respected as something infinite, even if boundaries (common forms of existence) have been drawn like fate around it, borders beyond which it can not escape and which its physiognomy constantly remembers. If the person strives for visibility and communicability, then these are often denied to him; if the person flees from visibility and communicability, then these are constantly there.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Love can bring people out of isolation, get them to take off the Halloween masks they wear, breathing through the slits.”
― Anne Lamott, Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage

“Nothing is more repulsive to me than the literary man who must immediately display every emotion and every experience to its best advantage and stick it on paper.”
― Ernst Jünger, Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918