Quotes About Introspection

Mi resi conto, allora, che l'unico vero collaudo della forza – del tono muscolare, per così dire – della sanità mentale è la capacità di sostenere l'urto di un interrogativo dietro l'altro senza che vi sia neanche l'ombra di una risposta.

You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary? What do you know of dignity hard-achieved, and dignity lost through innocence, and dignity lost by sacrifice for a cause one cannot name. What do you know about getting fat against your will, and turning into a clown of an arriviste baron when you would rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat from these damned democratic states.

It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then

When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others.

Most people, no matter how brilliant, are vessels. Once you come to the end of what is interesting in them, you can touch the side of the jar. There will be nothing afterward but repetition of what you have learned already. It might take a night, a year, or half a lifetime, but once you can reach the side of the vessel, a good part of the larger feeling is gone.

Our minds race ahead of us and summon strangers.

A man lays his character on the line when he writes a novel. Anything in him which is lazy, or meretricious, or unthought-out, complacent, fearful, overambitious, or terrified by the ultimate logic of his exploration will be revealed in his book.

It is a credo for lonely people: My heart is my church.

I heard her calling to me from caverns so deep in herself she was never aware of her own voice.

For it's exactly when we come closest to another, that we are turned away with a lie, and blunder forward to comprehend ourselves on the misperceptions of the past.

But then I thought: you left to leave. Staying in his ambience like this is stupid and it is lacerative.

It was safe to talk to yourself because of the roar you were subsumed in, besides being alone. I fragmented. One sense I had was that I was going to die sometime anyway. Another was that the falls were something you could never apply the term fake or stupid to. This has to be animism, was another feeling.

Our problem is to become acquainted with our own selves, letting our personalities loose upon the world for the sheer adventure of their full development and in the positive hope that they may in their own way lift the level of humanity.

Self-knowledge is the beginning of self-correction.

Since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking.

they never see what they're too much of a hurry to look for

I call myself seven or eight times a day just to see how I am.' 'How are you?' he asked politely. 'Not very well, I'm afraid.

And you only have one face." "Is that bad?" asked Milo, making sure it was still there. "You'll soon wear it out using it for everything," replied the Dodecahedron.

it seemed a great wonder that the world, which was so large, could sometimes feel so small and empty.

I know one thing for certain; it's much harder to tell whether you ARE lost than whether you WERE lost, for, on many occasions where you're going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone, and, since it's much more difficult to find your way back from someplace you've never left, I suggest you go there immediately and then decide.

If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.

It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.

He had become enveloped in the Indian Summer of the Soul.

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.