Quotes About Introspection

Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.

Even the wind had ceased, and there seemed to be nothing in the world but the darkness and himself. In that gigantic blackness, in that unseen quietude and vacancy, the mind could cease to be personal to itself. It could be overwhelmed and merged in space, so that consciousness would be transferred or dissipated, and one might sleep standing; for the mind fears loneliness more than all else, and will escape to the moon rather than be driven inwards on its own being.

For the mind fears loneliness more than all else, and will escape to the moon rather than be driven inwards on its own being.

Saul was hunched over his drink like it was a small fire.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.

We all have faults, mine is being wicked.

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

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why

The noblest study of mankind is Man, says Man.

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly--too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System--the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

I would be the last person to say that madness is not a solution.

We all have flaws, he said, and mine is being wicked.

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from and to and why.

We cannot erase what we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier.

A myopic focus on the proposed psychopathology of perpetrators, or on their alleged extraordinary personalities, tells us more about our own personal dreams of how we wish the world to work than it does about the reality of perpetrator behavior. In that role, such explanations satisfy an important emotional demand of distancing us from them.

We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected

I have torn myself out of many bitter places In America, that seemed Tall and green-rooted in mid-noon.

He will rattle your cage and then break your heart.

I feel slow. I think slowly, I talk slowly, I react slowly. In the blur and rush of everything around me, I am more mindful. The mindfulness has grown quietly and surely, perhaps more a result of my slow, sparse environment in Kanglung than my own efforts. I can see how it would evaporate here without a consistent daily practice. I

I need to be alone. After a full day of talking, smiling, listening, showing, nodding, translating, I want to be alone. I want simply to come home, close the door, and sit in silence, gathering up the bits of myself that have come loose. I want to think, or not think. I want to rest.

Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: "Smell is the sense of the imagination.

Humans were neither all good nor all bad—they were just human and fallible, herself included.

Even though he wasn't always considerate of her, would another man be any different?