Quotes About Introspection

although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)

I'm always so glad,' Sylvie murmured, 'that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.' 'You're very good at being yourself,' Ursula said, aware that it didn't necessarily sound like a compliment. 'Well, I've had years of practice.

Get down,' Bunty says grimly. 'Mummy's thinking.' (Although what Mummy's actually doing is wondering what it would be like if her entire family was wiped out and she could start again.)

The mind is a fathomless mystery.

Doing nothing was much more productive than people thought; Jackson often had his most profound insights when he appeared to be entirely idle. He didn't get bored, he just went into a nothing kind of place.

I'm not myself, she said and then laughed maniacally, but God knows who I am.

It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it.

Juliet sighed and wondered if one day she would think herself to death. Was that possible? And would it be painful?

There were so many facts that Amelia no longer felt certain about (or perhaps she had never known them). She would soon be nearer fifty than forty, and she was sure that every day she could feel more neural pathways disappearing—fusing and arcing and dying—leaving her unable to retrieve information.

Why did people understand how precious each day was only once the doors to the grave had opened and they had looked inside? What was the point of that?

One of the things Jackson liked about Julia was her independence, one of the things he didn't like about Julia was her independence.

I myself am usually to be found lying on the bed imitating the dead Chatterton, killing time by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds i´ve discovered so far).

Sister Michael turned and looked at him, and, despite her plump, jolly face, she had nuns' eyes, and nuns' eyes, Jackson knew, could see right inside your head, so he nodded respectfully at the statue. Sanguis Christi, inebria me.

Amelia looked at the eggs-like sickly, jaundiced eyes-and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light-

The gods were on the point of giving up when Brahma said, 'I know where we will hide man's divinity, we will hide it inside him. he will search the whole world but never look inside and find what is already within.

But he who neither thinks for himself nor learns from others, is a failure as a man.

I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I go to my desk.

Either accept people for what they are, or don't. So, in other words, man, if people don't know me, I think they do themself an injustice. Because, as a whole, I think I'm a good person.

The circumstances which a man encounters with suffering are the result of his own mental inharmony.

As soon as you can say what you think and not what some other person has thought for you, you are on the way to being a remarkable man.

I have always found that the man whose second thoughts are good is worth watching.

All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves.

Self-love leads men of narrow minds to measure all mankind by their own capacity.

To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences.