Quotes About Introspection

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?" —ADAM PHILLIPS, BRITISH PSYCHOANALYST AND PHILOSOPHER (1954–), FREUDIAN EXISTENTIALIST

I am not looking for a thing ; I am searching for a spiritual experience .

The meaning of life is not something we look for, it is something we create.

We slough off the responsibility to create ourselves by shrugging and claiming, "That's just the way I am.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention–difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering–and this is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.

Things will have to change. And one of those things that will have to change: People will have to change their internal world." On

and what he knows and we know (Odysseus), the poet introduces an important theme that will continue to grow throughout his poem, which is: What is the difference between who we are and what others know about us? This tension between anonymity and identity will be a

The quest for this simple bliss, free from dogmas and religious beliefs, from submission to a priesthood, and from the hope of being sanctified by others, is the object of each person's search.

When I sat on a camp stool in the garden in a black coat with a black flap hat I felt like a marble guest who had returned from times long past into a strange world.

Le monde entier est dans ce que nous disons - et tout entier éclairé par ce que nous taisons. (p. 34)

Forced to think you end up coming to a conclusion.Forced to come to a conclusion you make a decision.And once you made the decision you really acts.

Our reasons for reading what we do are as eccentric as our reasons for living as we do.

A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself.

The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it.

I realized that most thoughts are impersonal happenings, like self-assembling machines. Unless we train ourselves, the thoughts passing through our mind have little involvement with our will. It is strange to realize that even our own thoughts pass by like scenery out the window of a bus, a bus we took by accident while trying to get somewhere else.

On hashish, he saw the elaborate furnishings of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior concentrating "to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm . . . To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry.

Carl Jung wrote: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

He saw thinking as a form of intoxication.

You are not going to find the meaning of life hidden under a rock written by someone else. You'll find it by giving meaning to life from inside yourself

But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live

I'm possibly a very morbid person but I think about death a lot.

I have no idea how much money I've got.

They sat in an awkward, embarrassed silence for a moment, the way Englishmen are apt to do after sharing private thoughts.