Quotes About Introspection

The "gift" of tragedy is not destruction, but humility

Who do you see when you think of you? Are you an outsider, Cool, distant, angry, swimming against the current, or are you in the flow? When they tell you, This is who you are, do you say yes or no? Who do you see when you look beyond the skin and the surface, when you drift to sleep, when you are the person no one else knows? Who are you on the inside? Don't answer these questions. Not yet. First, open your eyes, your mind, your heart. See.

Dogen tells us to "cease practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate yourself.

When we take ourselves too seriously, we are at the risk of taking other things, including God, too lightly,

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to becoming partly a dog.

Fife... simply walked off by himself, into the jungle to look at all the things which would continue to exist after he had ceased to. There were a lot of them. Fife looked at them all. They remained singularly unchanged by his scrutiny.

Agenbite of inwit. Conscience.

Shut your eyes and see.

Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.

Face it, people, there is more to your malaise than celestial mechanics. If you want to know why you feel so bad, you must look beyond universal gravitation.

if you stay still for long enough, the universe whispers its secrets to you.

I sat on the concrete stump, collecting snow atop my dome, benumbed and befucked by my colossal overpowering lack of knowledge.

I took some time out for life.

I feel like I'm slipping but do people who are actually slipping feel that way or is it always the really good people who are moving up who invariably think they're slipping because their standards are so high?" Arron Altman Broadcast News 1987

Righteousness is simply a humble understanding of how unrighteous one is coupled with a deep commitment to become better.

Likewise a poet.

As the blood flowed back to his brain, he turned back into the rather formal young man I had worked so hard to corrupt.

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.

Every third night a commitee holds a meeting in my head.

I'm over the hill for come-on lines. On a quiet day, I can hear my liver rotting. For exercise, I fall down.

Too much time alone had done something peculiar to his heart: A confused and unreliable organ at best, it now held something akin to joy.

Comedians don't laugh. They're too busy analyzing why it's funny or not.

An unexamined faith is not worth having, for it can only be true by accident. A faith worth having is faith worth discussing and testing.

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.