Quotes About Introspection

but the bravest man among us is afraid of himself

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.

If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place

Those who go beneath the surface, do so at their peril.

As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

So many things are unexplainable, and how is it that we know a life, except that we know our own, and it is brought into focus by the death of those around us. (less)

Genius is lonely.

Know your enemy, know yourself.

Above his desk he tacked a line he remembered from the Persian poet, Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

We have always absorbed our own disintegration.

The overexamined life, Claire, it's not worth living.

He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground.

The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward. No

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

In his book Pensées, a collection of fragments of theology and philosophy, the seventeenth-century French philosopher Pascal suggested that all of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit, alone, in one room.

We stumble on, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

A volte sono depresso e non apro bocca per giorni. In quei casi, non deve pensare che sia di cattivo umore. Basta lasciarmi stare e presto mi passa.