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Quotes About Inner life

In a way, part of the widespread success of happiness actually lies in that it delivers a legitimate, universalizing and apolitical discourse for individualism - a discourse that conceives one's life as separate from community and which sees the inner life as the cause and root of all behaviors.
~ Eva Illouz
A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.
~ Wassily Kandinsky
I've talked so much about virtuous circles; here is a vicious cycle. Knowing we have someplace "else" to go in a moment of boredom leaves us less experienced at exploring our inner lives and therefore more likely to want the stimulation of what is on our phones.
~ Sherry Turkle
I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.
~ Siri Hustvedt
But don't you think that everybody is finally the same in the most essential ways? Some lives are probably much duller than others, but it's impossible to know how people live inside themselves, isn't it? I mean, a life could seem boring on the outside and be tumultuous within. Isn't cruelty more contemptible than ordinariness?
~ Siri Hustvedt
In the late fifties and sixties, our nation had not yet become a place where the poor would be regarded solely with contempt. In the growing up years of my life, my siblings and I were constantly told that it was a sin to place ourselves above others. We were taught that material possessions told you nothing about the inner life of another human being, whether they were a loving, a person of courage and integrity. We were told to look past material trappings and find the person inside.
~ bell hooks
There was something in this girl he could never grasp, an inner life inscrutable to him. He was in awe of the child's flights of fancy, her insatiable passion always to be running off somewhere, her active inner life.
~ Susan Vreeland
Soon I was incorporating :( and ;) and ;( too and after that the live emoticons, and now, without any intention of ever reducing the enormity of my human emotions to these shallow shortcuts, to this typographical juvenilia, I went around all day reducing them and reducing them, endowing emotions with, and requiring them to carry the subtle quivering burdens of my inner life.
~ Joshua Ferris
When a character has so many secrets and so much inner life, it's a joy to play those characters because you can use your craft.
~ Viola Davis
I want to keep an inner life alive and, with luck, somebody else's, too.
~ Romesh Gunesekera
For me, 'Pariah' is very much about that inner churn. It's about this person's emotional inner life, and that's really what I wanted to bring to 'Bessie.'
~ Dee Rees
After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.
~ Evelyn Underhill
It is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.
~ Evelyn Underhill
I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Genuine happiness can only be achieved when we transform our way of life from the unthinking pursuit of pleasure to one committed to enriching our inner lives, when we focus on 'being more' rather than simply having more.
~ Daisaku Ikeda
Life is lived on the inside. What's outside doesn't matter.
~ Sonya Hartnett
I love a natural look in pictures. I like people with a feeling one way or another - it shows an inner life. I like to see that there's something going on inside them.
~ Marilyn Monroe
Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast... Viscosity and Velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination; velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled, or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
~ Susanna Kaysen
Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination; velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
~ Susanna Kaysen
An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy
~ Susanna Kaysen
Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination; velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
~ Susanna Kaysen
The man who articulate the movements of his inner life, who can give names to his varied experiences, need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering. He is able to create space for Him who heart is greater than his, whose eyes see more than his, and whose hands can heal more than his.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
As I read these words, I am keenly aware of how full my inner life is with this kind of talk. In fact, I am seldom without some imaginary encounter in my head in which I explain myself, boast or apologize, proclaim or defend, evoke praise or pity. It seems that I am perpetually involved in long dialogues with absent partners, anticipating their questions and preparing my responses. I am amazed by the emotional energy that goes into these inner ruminations and murmurings.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.
~ Henry David Thoreau