Quotes About Introspection

not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you, you must travel for yourself.

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me, In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me.

I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

Do not descend amongst professors or capitalists.

I am he who walks the States with a barb'd tongue, questioning every one I meet

I know perfectly well my own egotism, And know my omnivorous words, and cannot say any less, And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.

I am he who walks the States with a barb'd tongue, questioning every one I meet, Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before? Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?

Was somebody asking to see the soul?

If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders.

As if any man really knew aught of my life, Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life, Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustomed routine; if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me. —Walt Whitman, from "To You," Leaves of Grass (Simon Schuster, August 1st 2006) Originally published July 4th 1855.

I exist as I am, that is enough, If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

Re-examine all that you have been told... Dismiss that which insults your soul.

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

Here by myself away from the clank of the world,   Tallying and talk'd to here by tongues aromatic

You have not known what you are—you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;

I will not be outfaced by irrational things, I will penetrate what it is in them that is sarcastic upon me

Creeds and schools in abeyance

For America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without;

Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body (Leaves of Grass preface)

It is time to explain myself—let us stand up.

I am given up by traitors; I talk wildly . . . . I have lost my wits . . . . I and nobody else am the greatest traitor, I went myself first to the headland . . . . my own hands carried me there.

I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held so much goodness

Worse and worse...Can't you stand it? Are you retreating? Is this hour with the living too dead for you?