Quotes About Introspection

The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honorable and informed life requires examining others' lives, not just one's own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others. And if we do, we know that nobody is nobody.

Mountaineering is always spoken of as though summiting is conquest, but as you get higher, the world gets bigger, and you feel smaller in proportion to it, overwhelmed and liberated by how much space is around you, how much room to wander, how much unknown.

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.—WALLACE STEVENS, "OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS

Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.

A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant.

When I read, I ceased to be my-self, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug.

One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, "Why are you asking that?

The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anectodes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt.

Adulthood is made up of a prudent anticipation and a philosophical memory that make you navigate more slowly and steadily.

Introspection is often portrayed as an indoor, solitary thing, the monk in his cell, the writer at her desk.

By now you've noticed that Woolf says "I don't know" quite a lot.

Books are solitudes in which we meet

Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting.

Just because the question can be answered doesn't mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked.

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, 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.

As Sidda joined Vivi in staring out into the darkness of the fields, where hundreds of sunflowers grew, she thought: I will never fully know my mother, any more than I will ever know my father or Connor, or myself. I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

Every time I thought that I was put together, I realized that we're always putting ourselves together, gathering the world in, letting it sift down and form us.

sadness usually does, as soon as I sat down and began to listen. The small press had a correspondingly

sadness we did not have to work on. It came, as sadness usually does, as soon as I sat down and began to listen. The small press had a correspondingly

My work expresses an infatuation with human beings. I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

I prayed and read the Bible, but I couldn't get any help. You don't notice how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help.

Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable.

But why should a man want to marry a woman who doesn't do anything to people but blame them for things they haven't done? It will be like spending one's whole life being rubbed with moral sandpaper.

Thought that is worth calling thought has no mercy on itself, that is the dreadful proof of its quality.