Nadine Gordimer Quotes

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

The moving toward one's inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.

Perhaps the longest journey is the journey within.

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life.

For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter.

Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul. In ancient times, purposeful solitude was both palliative and preventative. It was used to heal fatigue and to prevent weariness. It was also used as an oracle, as a way of listening to the inner self to solicit advice and guidance otherwise impossible to hear in the din of daily life.

Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!

One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.

She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be - for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.

Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.

The knowledge of self is the most important thing, because how are you going to know God if you don't know yourself? How are you going to know anything if you don't know yourself?

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Your life is a mirror. Life gives us not what we want. Life gives us who we are

Gently resist the temptation to chase your dreams into the world; pursue them in your heart until they disappear into the Self, and leave them there.

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.

Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being.

The real essence of art turned out to be not something high up and far off - it was right inside my ordinary daily self - If a musician wants to become a finer artist, he must first become a finer person.

There was something special about being in a strange place, all alone in a mass of people even if you had just screwed up your life, or perhaps especially if you had just screwed up your life.

Self-reflection is the school of wisdom.

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.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

Let sannyas be the turning point. That's what sannyas is all about: a return journey. One starts moving inwards rather than moving outwards.