Quotes About Introspection

Are you going somewhere?" I said, regarding him timidly. The suit made him seem a different person, less melancholy and distracted, more capable—unlike the Hobie of my first visit, with his bedraggled aspect of an elegant but mistreated polar bear.

Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care all about the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right reasons? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet- for me anyway- all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

A life spent at one's desk is a life alone.

Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty.

Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words." — JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress," he began, "you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward." Bunyan's muckraker, he suggested, "typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing.

There I go When my heart all worn by grief Sinketh low. Where my baseless hopes do lie There to find my peace, go I. Sad and slow . . 

What fired in Lincoln this furious and fertile time of self-improvement? The answer lay in his readiness to gaze in the mirror and soberly scrutinize himself. Taking stock, he found himself wanting. From the beginning, young Lincoln aspired to nothing less than to inscribe his name into the book of communal memory.

humility is the first and greatest of virtues.

acknowledge errors and learn from

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

Sometimes I dislike women I dislike us all because of our capacity for not thinking when it suits us...

We are being punished, that's all." "What for?" he demanded, already on guard because there was a tone in her voice he hated. "For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would be.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

The young often have moments of clear thinking, which as they grow older become fewer, and muddied. He had kept alive in some part of him a knowledge that he was "destined" to do something or other. He felt this as pure and unsullied, but—more often and more deeply as he grew older—"impractical".

The point is, it seems to me that my mind is a mass of totally contradictory attitudes about everything.' 'Everyone's mind is a mass of contradictory attitudes. Why should it matter?' 'It should matter to us, surely?

Žena bez muškarca ne može se upoznati s muškarcem, s bilo kojim muškarcem , bilo koje dobi, a da ne pomisli, makar to bilo i na pola sekunde: Možda je ovo pravi muškarac.