Quotes About Introspection

there was no answer he knew, until he actually faced death.

Most of us move through life with little chance to learn much about ourselves. We know some things we like and some things we dislike, we have a few ideas about what makes us happy, and we die in ignorance regarding anything profound within ourselves.

Ljudi kažu da nas ?esto najviše vre?a deo sopstvenog lika u drugom ?oveku.

learn the nature of self, accept all aspects of self, then the mastery can begin. Denial of self is denial of all.

I am not a learned man. I have read a certain amount, enough to know I know very little. But I have read enough to have some sense that all men think of themselves as heroes, at least heroes of their own lives, and that no man who did evil thought he was doing such.

Os defeitos que vemos nos outros nunca parecem tão terríveis como os que vemos em nós...

We each of us have it within to make ourselves over, if we choose to do so. Most of us not only do not try, but don't even acknowledge that ability to ourselves.

But the real test of honor for a man is to live and learn to love himself.

Les gens, continue Lalix, ils se croient des petites merveilles, tout ce qu'ils font, tout ce qu'ils sont. Ils s'attribuent une importance... Alors, s'il fallait, par-dessus, encaisser le récit de leurs rêves, on n'en finirait plus.

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.

For Goddsakes, am I, who carries an entire world within me, a body?

epimeleia heautou

Every morning I had to force myself to leave the apartment, so dark and protected, its walls lined with books. I stared longingly at the few English titles scattered among them. No, I'd tell myself sternly, you will not sit in an apartment in Rome reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. Get out there and have some experiences for yourself, religious or otherwise. And I'd push myself out into the relentless noise and glare.

Exiting the ideological cave, where all our questions are answered and everyone we know agrees with us, is the hardest and most significant step we can take. But if we don't take that step, then we will leave this life no closer to the truth than when we entered it. And that is exactly what it is to live a life not worth living, even if it proves to be the most pleasant sort of existence.

inside out, with all the Sturm und

Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.

In order to heal the external world, we must begin within. Reality is always a reflection of what's on the inside. It's a law:

Sometimes the greatest gifts can be found in the darkest, deepest closets of the mind.

I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods.

To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.

Why do such bad questions get predictably asked? Maybe part of the problem is that we have learned to ask the wrong questions of ourselves. Our culture is steeped in a kind of pop psychology whose obsessive question is: Are you happy? We ask it so reflexively that i seems natural to wish that a pharmacist with a time machine could deliver a lifetime supply of antidepressants to Bloomsbury, so that an incomparable feminist prose stylist could be reoriented to produce litters of Woolf babies.

How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, and minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel.