... the Oxford book of aphorisms.

It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the result of great reading in a full and powerful mind.

—Sydney Smith, Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy.

... an excerpt.

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

—W. H. Auden, "Reading," in The Dyer’s Hand.

... some aphorisms.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.

—Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, 49.