Quotes About Introspection

A crisis pauses during tea.

Tea elevates our minds so that we can see our problems from a distance — through the fine mists of contemplation.

It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.

Here, in your mind, you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be.

The toughest battle is Mind.

And why should I rekindle these smoking embers? Why call up from their casements the ghosts of the dead?

With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?

Learning how to operate a soul takes time.

Let America realize that self-scrutiny is not treason, self-examination is not disloyalty.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them and see his fellows with impartial eye afar, for half his days, he is esteemed a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods, he is esteemed industrious and enterprising — making earth bald before its time.

You can only trust yourself... and barely that.

In violence we forget who we are, just as we forget who we are when engaged in sheer perception.

We are more inclined to regret our virtues than our vices; but only the very honest will admit this.

Weekend goals: not leaving my bedroom, not leaving my house, not going to a party. My childhood punishments have become my adult goals.

In the looking-glass we see our form, in wine the heart.

Your writing chamber isn't the office or the study — it's your heart.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

Writing is both a sacrificing and a saving of soul.

Herein a power lies, within the reach Of all who study what it fain would teach; Whereby the writer by his pen doth show The inward self of those we outward know...

When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait.... "The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face." You're doomed to being you. This, he says, leaves us free to draw anything, since we're only drawing ourselves. Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away.... Everything is a self-portrait.

A joke is at most a temporary rebellion against virtue, and its aim is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.

There are people who place a basket on your head to see what you carry.

If you are losing your leisure, look out, you may be losing your soul.

A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there, with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I felt God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that happy sense of nearness all my life.