Quotes About Introspection

How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.

Almost makes you wonder if someone was guiding us, strange as that sounds. I feel a swelling in my chest, and I honestly don't know if it's pity or jealousy of her belief that God or her dead brother can reach out and affect her life like that. I take her head in my hands and hold her closer, wondering which of us is lost and which is guiding the other someplace new.

The place at which the contrast between forms of intelligibility is most vividly presented is in the understanding of ourselves.

Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside

Si yo fuera solipsista, probablemente no habría escrito este libro, pues no creería que hubiese alguien más que lo leyera.

Our learning ought to be our lives' amendment, and the fruits of our private study ought to appear in our public behavior.

Of those who say nothing, few are silent.

These are the times that try men's souls.

why do men continue to practice in themselves, the absurdities they despise in others? Thomas Paine, The rights of man: being an answer to Mr Burke's attack on the French Revolution (2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1791), p. 41.

Mind thine own concerns.

Propria mea minte este biserica mea.

I shall neither copy their humility, nor disturb their devotion.

Our own attitudes always seem OK because we use an attitude to judge itself. No matter how much misery our attitudes cause, we will always defend them.

Words are not simply an expression of the self; they help to create the self. In struggling to say what we are, we become what we say.

Some people say they haven't yet found themselves. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.

You never know yourself till you know more than your body.

in the true order everything is seen from within.

Her mirror was her only intimate, and she wanted its reflection to be the single most important statement she cared to make.

she rose and drifted about the room at length, clasping and unclasping her hands, pressing them to her temples as if she would seal in certain broodings which lay hidden there.

He felt his jaw again, wiggling it back and forth, then nodding. "And now you'll be tellin' me they started

Better is that sin which humbles me, than that duty which makes me proud.

Many people think it is enough to bring their bodies to the assembly, but never look at their hearts. They satisfy themselves that they have been at church, though they have not been with God there.

Self-examination [means] setting up a court in [your] conscience and keeping a register there that by strict scrutiny a man may know how things stand between God and his own soul.

Los cristianos escuchan mucho, pero me temo que aprenden poco.