Quotes About Introspection

The question failure asks is: what don't we know that we don't know?

If you're honest with yourself, you can still feel the terrible weight of time pressing on you; that awful, relentless, bodily corruption that is happening constantly to us all.

Human beings," he said, "have a bottomless capacity for rationalization and self-deception.

Moby Dick is my favorite book —I've been rereading it every year since I was sixteen. 'Call me Ishmael' is the greatest first line in a novel ever written.""I, myself, am not fond of animal stories.

until he was standing alone before them.

You see, between me and life there is a mist of words always.

I'm never better than when I'm alone.

As I get older, Vincent, I have come to prefer a quiet evening at home to a bracing exchange of gunfire in the dark.

had a marriage and a child. If there were doubts, if there were periods of null depression or active despairing, these could only mean that I was ungrateful, insatiable, perhaps a monster.

My 'temper' was a dark, wicked blotch in me, not a response to events in the outer world.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers.

What is required after a glimpse of awakening is radical honesty, a willingness to look at how we unenlighten ourselves, how we bring ourselves back into the gravitational force of the dream state, how we allow ourselves to be divided.

True inquiry is experiential

Meditation is like an oven that forces the truth out.

But what is it? What is it like to experience blame? By questioning, "What is this?" consciousness is allowed to get inside of it. So you see, there might be blame, but now it is blame that's conscious. If you try to do something with the blame, such as get rid of it, then you are not really with it.

Whatever thoughts you have about yourself aren't who and what you are. There is something more primary that is watching the thoughts.

Bronze in the mirror of the form, wine of the mind.

Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.

To many mortals silence great gain brings.

When deep slumber falls, remembered sins Chafe the sore heart with fresh pain, and no Welcome wisdom meets within.

Bronze is the mirror of the form wine, of the heart.

Don't look where you fall, but where you slipped.

A camel never sees its own hump.