Quotes About Inwardness

Boldness directs attention outward and keeps the illusion alive. It never induces awkwardness or embarrassment. And so we admire the bold, and prefer to be around them, because their self-confidence infects us and draws us outside our own realm of inwardness and reflection.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle.

Out of town I could simply be , I could feel my self , firm and calm and unmalleable as I could not when I was in school or in any of the usual human communities that seemed to weaken or scatter me. I could sit for an hour in the rocks above the Knife River, asking for no more discourse than that water's monotonous gabble. I was an inward child, it was true, but beyond that, I felt a contentment outside human society that I couldn't feel within it.

Other people are joyous, like on the feast of the ox, like on the way up to the terrace in the spring. I alone am inert, giving no sign, like a newborn baby who has not learned to smile.

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

I'm good, I don't need no help. Cause I'm better off by myself then to start over with somebody else.

But you haven't got the boy, he thought. You have only yourself...

as if your essence were hung up in a closet like a dress too good to be worn and you were reduced to going out in only your appearance.

The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.

We grasp one thing after another, and when we have grasped a thing, it is as if it possessed us. Not we possess it, but the opposite: whatever we have apparently acquired rules over us then. It is impressed upon us that a beneficent effect is to be had from acquiring a little that is firm and definite, that is to say, from growing accustomed and shaping oneself to laws and commands that prescribe a strict external discipline. Perhaps we're being stupefied, certainly we're being made small.

I had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible.

Each man had only one genuine vocation—to find the way to himself.… His task was to discover his own destiny—not an arbitrary one—and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness." —from Demian by Hermann Hesse

It was the inward, not the outer world that engrossed Shackleton. He did not share the semi-pagan nature worship in which Nansen and Nordenskjöld were steeped.

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

The life of the spirit is not our life, but the life of God within us.

Life is in ourselves and not in the external.

spiritual accountability proved insufficient for Peter, because no outward teaching can compare to the inward power of the Holy Spirit.

La soledad es la posibilidad del aislamiento. Si te es imposible vivir solo, naciste esclavo.

Ho vissuto tanto senza aver vissuto! Ho pensato tanto senza aver pensato! Mondi di violenze immobili, di avventure trascorse senza movimento, pesano su di me. Sono stanco di ciò che non ho mai avuto e che non avrò, stanco di Dei che non esistono. Porto con me le ferite di tutte le battaglie che ho evitato. Il mio corpo è dolorante per lo sforzo che non ho nemmeno pensato di fare.

A liberdade é a possibilidade do isolamento.

Fascism is not an article for export.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

Maybe that was what happened when people grew up in a place where mountains shut them in, kept everything turned inward, buffered them from everything else. How long did it take before that landscape become internalized, was passed down from generation to generation like blood type or eye color?

My soul is like the dead sea, over which no bird can fly; when it gets halfway, it sinks down spent to its death and destruction.