Quotes About Introspection

But when I lean over the chasm of myself— it seems my God is dark and like a web: a hundred roots silently drinking. This is the ferment I grow out of. More I don't know, because my branches rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

At first the solitude charmed me like a prelude, but so much music wounded me.

Just be sure that you observe carefully what wells up within you and place that above everything that you notice around you.

Think... of the world which you carry within yourself... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood. Then the knowing comes: I can open to another life that's wide and timeless. So I am sometimes like a tree rustling over a gravesite and making real the dream of the one its living roots embrace: a dream once lost among sorrows and songs.

Yes, he knew that we was withdrawing from everything: not merely from human beings. A moment more and everything will have lost its meaning, and that table and the cup, and the chair to which he clings, all the near and the commonplace, will have become unintelligible, strange and heavy. So he sat there and waited until it should have happened. And defended himself no longer.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue...Live the questions.

Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart's curtain?

If you think your world isn't poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that's not because it's a dull world, that's because you're not poet enough to wake its soul up.

Amid these fading and decaying things, be the glass that rings out as it's breaking.

Let your judgements have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried.

For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring.

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.

I, who even as a child had been so distrustful of music (not because it took me out of myself more powerfully than anything else, but because I had noticed that it did not put me back where it had found me, but left me deeper down, somewhere in the heart of things unfinished)...

But your solitude will be your home and haven even in the midst of very strange conditions, and from there you will discover all your paths.

Ich sitze und lese einen Dichter. Es sind viele Leute im Saal, aber man spürt sie nicht. Sie sind in den Büchern. Manchmal bewegen sie sich in den Blättern, wie Menschen, die schlafen und sich umwenden zwischen zwei Träumen. Ach, wie gut ist es doch, unter lesenden Menschen zu sein. Warum ist es nicht immer so?

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

there is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving. .

For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.

Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation. You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold, comes at long last over everyone. (Gieb deine Schönheit immer hin ohne Rechnen und Reden. Du schweigst. Sie sagt für dich: Ich bin. Und kommt in tausendfachem Sinn, kommt endlich über jeden.)

To keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your while development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.

Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.