Quotes About Introspection

The constant ability to see into the lives of our neighbors, to compare ourselves to strangers, to be in constant contact with the entire planet day and night, is unnatural and pushes the human mind far beyond its capacity for reason and reflection.

So few people are really aware of their thoughts. Their minds run all over the place without their permission, and they go along for the ride unknowingly and without making a choice.

The first step toward patience is to become aware of when your internal dialogue is running wild and dragging you with it.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

No one remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

I know I am talking nonsense, but I'd rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.

It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life.

Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.

I may be the wrong person for my life.

By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.

After the long time of going together and the mutual trust that had grown out of that time, Payne had occasion to realize that no mutual trust had grown out of the long time they had gone together.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.

Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.

Thinking isn't something you do. Most of the time, it's something that happens to you.

If he were not as he is, he would be better than himself.

It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed

A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.