Quotes About Introspection

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself…. The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.

It is only when the mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.

It is time to be old,To take in sail.

Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home;Thou art not my friend and I'm not thine.

Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.

To think is to act.

God enters by a private door into each individual.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.

Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate.

EnclosedIn a tumultuous privacy of storm.

The mind will quote whether the tongue does or not.

If a man examine carefully his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead.

He who travels in search of something which he has not got, travels away from himself and grows old even in youth among old things.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his own thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts they come back to us with a sort of alienated majesty.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity.

The reliance on property is...the want of self-reliance. Men measure the esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property...(Essays)

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men-that is genius.