Quotes About Introspection

I realize now that people are not thinking about you and me or caring what is said about us. They are thinking about themselves—before breakfast, after breakfast, and right on until ten minutes past midnight. They would be a thousand times more concerned about a slight headache of their own than they would about the news of your death or mine.

Don't complain about the snow on your neighbor's roof," said Confucius, "when your own doorstep is unclean.

Over three hundred years ago Galileo said:   You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.

J. Pierpont Morgan observed, in one of his analytical interludes, that a person usually has two reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one. The person himself will think of the real reason. You don't need to emphasize that. But all of us, being idealists at heart, like to think of motives that sound good. So, in order to change people, appeal to the nobler motives.

What has habit been doing to me?

Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will ever object to your saying: 'I may be wrong. Let's examine the facts.

There is a certain degree of satisfaction in having the courage to admit one's errors. It not only clears the air of guilt and defensiveness, but often helps solve the problem created by the error.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don't criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be.

People who talk only of themselves think only of themselves. And those people who think only of themselves, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, longtime president of Columbia University, said, are hopelessly uneducated. They are not educated, said Dr. Butler, no matter how instructed they may be.

Do you know someone you would like to change and regulate and improve? Good! That is fine. I am all in favour of it. But why not begin on yourself?

To leave the road of continual failure, a person must first utter the three most difficult words to say: 'I was wrong.

wrongdoers, blaming everybody but themselves. We

Son, you are 1500 miles from home, and you don't feel any different, do you? I knew you wouldn't, because you took with you the one thing that is the cause of all your trouble, that is, yourself. There is nothing wrong with either your body or your mind. It is not the situations you have met that have thrown you; it is what you think of these situations. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." When you realize that, son, come home, for you will be cured.

criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home.

Every one thinks he's a good person, even those on Death Row.

Talk about your own mistakes before criticising the other person.

Let's keep a record of the fool things we have done and criticize ourselves. Since we can't hope to be perfect, let's do what E.H. Little did: let's ask for unbiased, helpful, constructive criticism.

most people go through college and learn to read Virgil and master the mysteries of calculus without ever discovering how their own minds function.

He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt

How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.