Quotes About Introspection

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.

Insist upon yourself. Be original.

I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine

Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it. -

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.

People are to be taken in very small doses. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.

A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.