Quotes About Introspection

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her own life.

Dånet och sorlet från havsstranden fyller mina örons snäckor. Men de förmår inte driva undan mina förföljare: Mina tankars frågor ställes och upprepas. Men det finns inga svar åt dem --- de slår sönder sig bara, emot en granithård mur. De kastas tillbaka, sköljs bort. Men de kommer igen, alltid igen, som vågorna utifrån vattenvidden.

It was like picking up a book and reading the things the main character did and said and his description and thinking vaguely, at first, Why, I'm that way a little. Then more, until the realization comes like a giant boulder down the hill and crashes into you, pulverizing you with the knowledge that this is you, this character.

One of his favorite lines was that talking is overrated.

Every year his world felt like it got a little smaller. Maybe that was just the way things went as people aged.

You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.

There they were," she went on, "the stars. And he asked himself, my great-grandfather — that boy: 'What are they? Why are they? And who am I?' as one does, sitting alone, with no one to talk to, looking at the stars.

I am in the mood to dissolve into the sky

The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

often she had seemed to herself to be moving among those vanished figures of old books and pictures, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends. she very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own.

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

To love makes one solitary.

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one's own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.

who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?