Variant: Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
“We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.”
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Anne Lamott 146
Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist 1954Related quotes

Und doch sehr oft, wenn wir uns von dem Beabsichtigten für ewig getrennt sehen, haben wir schon auf unserm Wege irgend ein anderes Wünschenswerthe gefunden, etwas uns Gemäßes, mit dem uns zu begnügen wir eigentlich geboren sind.
Maxim 68, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Science Watch (September 1994)
Context: I don't believe that the ultimate theory will come by steady work along existing lines. We need something new. We can't predict what that will be or when we will find it because if we knew that, we would have found it already! It could come in the next 20 years, but we might never find it.

“I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”
Anderson-Reagan Presidential Debate (21 September 1980) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29407
1980s
Context: With regard to the freedom of the individual for choice with regard to abortion, there's one individual who's not being considered at all. That's the one who is being aborted. And I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.

As quoted in Conversations With Allende (1970) by Regis Debray
Source: A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books

Letter to Bay Area Reporter as cited by the San Francisco Chronicle (October 21, 2001). Senate redistricting splits Castro: Gays accuse Burton of smoothing political path for Willie Brown http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/10/17/MN237054.DTL