Quotes About Self-examination

And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?

I could have been a dental hygienist with nothing bad ever appearing in print about me, but that's not how I've chosen to lead my life. I knew that you put yourself under a microscope the more famous you become.

I look singularly to myself, I am right nought;

Let us repeat this: inner action must precede all action.

It was in the waiting that a person experienced too much of himself. Memories, doubts, regrets, anxieties, the whole range of possibilities the future contained--they all swirled together in the mind like a soup.

Is there no I but I?

You don't need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don't ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.

It took me a while to want to do interviews.

I don't find myself intriguing.

I'm an introspective dude.

I'm an introspective person. I'm not an extrovert.

I am not very introspective.

I'm a very introspective individual.

I know who Jack Whittaker is. And some days I don't like who I am.

Receive what this great cornucopia has offered, Behold a useful and profitable book. If you think otherwise, Do not lay the blame on the book, but on yourself.

What takes place in me stays there.

I must congratulate myself, in passing, for never having lost the ability to examine my conscience, never having lost the gift of finding myself wanting & defective. Why fear the criticism of others when you, yourself, are first out of the critical gate? If self-denigration is the race I am the winner, even before the starting gun. Collect the bets.

The more I thought about this developmental scheme, the more something seemed profoundly wrong. I read and reread what I had written, trying to figure out what was so insistently bothering me. In an unflattering moment, it seemed to me that I had stated the case so carefully that I couldn't crack my own argument; and yet something was definitely wrong."32

I am the type of person that I complain about.

Oh my body, make of me a man who always questions!

ô mon corps, fait toujours de moi un homme qui s'interroge.

My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!" - Frantz Fanon, "Black Skin, White Masks

It is what we really are, and not a legal fiction, that will encounter the Light of Christ when this life ends. It's what we have actually made of ourselves that will be "tested by fire" (1 Peter 1:7).

We are franker towards others than towards ourselves.