Quotes About Introspection

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self." MAY SARTON

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.

How frequently do you look in the mirror? Does your face please you? Are you disgusted to detect familial features? Do you worship or hate your ancestors? Do you consider your image erotic? Do you pretend that you are a star's child? If you squint, does your reflection become abstract? Is abstraction a transcendental escape from identity or a psychotic spasm of depersonalization?

The solitary operatic feast, the banquet for one, onanism through the ear: taking an evening out of my life to listen to Simon Boccanegra, I feel I am locked in the bathroom eating a quart of ice cream, that I have lost all my friends, that I am committing some violently antisocial act, like wearing lipstick to school.

Later I will systemize my impossible subject, but for the moment I want to enjoy a tentative movement between its different chambers. I am not certain which are important and which are extraneous. Nor am I certain whether this topic is one that I have the strength to pursue.

Mother Teresa was once asked by a journalist why she does what she does, that is, how she is able to take the dying poor from the streets of Calcutta, nurse and love them. Her response reflected her deep self-knowledge: "I realized a long time ago that I had a Hitler within me."2 This realization became the basis of her self-transcendence and of her unique holiness.

The truth may hurt, but it is never so agonizing as the dagger of lies we tell ourselves.

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.

All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won't succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy.

I know I am a writer because until I'm writing I don't know what I know.

While we played, Meiying often sat by herself on the bench, huddled against the chill, looking at the library books on her lap, the pages glowing under the street lamp. The pages would sometimes turn in the wind, but she did not notice.

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn't one.

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 per cent of everything you do is for yourself And there isn't one.

The qualities we possess should never be a matter for satisfaction, but the qualities we have discarded.

Things that you're told as a child—your fear, your religion, your bigotry—become so much a part of you that's it hard to remove them when you grow to be an adult. Sometimes you don't realize such things are there until the moment of truth, and then they're suddenly as impossible to miss as a third arm, and as hard to cut off.

It's easy to look back and see it, and it's easy to give the advice. But the sad fact is, most people don't look beneath the surface until it's too late.

All of a sudden I didn't fit in anywhere. Not at school, not at home...and every time I turned around, another person I'd known forever felt like a stranger to me. Even I felt like a stranger to me.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.

The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.

We must honestly face our relationship with Great Britain.

By virtue of the literary work over which they meet, the reader and the writer both begin to loosen their hold on selfhood.

So softly Lizzy has to lean over to hear me, I say, 'I can't face the world until I know why I'm here.' You're kidding me.' I shake my head vehemently. 'No. I need to figure out my purpose. Until I do, what's the use of getting up?

Sometimes people think they are looking for the meaning of life, when really they are looking for an understanding of why they are here. What their purpose is, the purpose of life in general. And that's a much easier question to answer than the meaning of life.

The meaning of life is to give life a meaning.