Quotes About Introspection

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore/Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time/will stay up, read, write long letters/and wander the avenues, up and down/restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down.

Kendi içine yürümek ve saatler boyu kimselere rastlamamak. Ä°ÅŸte eriÅŸilmesi gereken ÅŸey bizler için

SENSE OF SOMETHING COMING: I am like a flag in the center of open space. I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live it through. while the things of the world still do not move: the doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full of silence, the windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down. I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea. I leap out, and fall back, and throw myself out, and am absolutely alone in the great storm.

There exists only one aloneness, and it is great, and it is not easy to bear. To nearly everyone come those hours that we would gladly exchange for any cheap or even the most banal camaraderie, for even the slightest inclination to choose the second-best or the most unworthy thing. But perhaps it is exactly in those hours when aloneness can flourish.

Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own — only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.

Have patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know.

Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

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… But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring.

Who has turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude of someone going away? Just as that person on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley one last time, turns, stops, lingers - so we live, forever taking our leave.

turn towards great and serious subjects, next to which irony becomes small and helpless.

How good it is to be among reading people. Why are they not always like that? You can go up to one of them and touch him lightly; he feels nothing. And if in rising, you chance to bump lightly against a neighbor and excuse yourself, he nods toward the side from which he hears your voice, his face turns toward you and does not see you, and his hair is like that of a man asleep. How comforting that is.

Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour

Whether it be the singing of a lamp or the voice of a storm, whether it be the breath of an evening or the groan of the ocean — whatever surrounds you, a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody.

Vielleicht sind gewisse meiner neulich ausgesprochenen Bedenken sehr übertrieben; so viel, wie ich mich kenne, scheint mir sicher, daß, wenn man mir meine Teufel austriebe, auch meinen Engeln ein kleinen, ein ganz kleiner (sagen wir) Schrecken geschähe, - und - fühlen Sie - gerade darauf darf ich es auf keinen Preis ankommen lassen.

Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: It's over---, even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me, even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye: I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch.

Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything;

I would finally just like to advise you to grow through your development quietly and seriously; you can interrupt it in no more violent manner than by looking outwards, and expecting answer from outside to questions which perhaps only your innermost feeling in your most silent hour can answer.

Und man hat niemand und nichts und faehrt in der Welt herum mit einem Koffer und mit einer Bücherkiste und eigentlich ohne Neugierde.

Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.

We don't know the contour of feeling; we only know what molds it from without.

particularly in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone

Amint észrevettem, lehalkítottam lépteimet. Amikor a szegények gondolkoznak, nem szabad zavarni Å'ket. Talán mégiscsak eszükbe jut.

I'm learning how to see. I don't know what the reason is, but everything enters into me more deeply and no longer stops at the point where it used to come to an end. I have an inner self that I knew nothing about. Now everything goes into it. I don't know what happens there.