Quotes About Introspection

She is too old to share her space with people she does not know, too set in her ways to share her space even with people she does.

Because I'm attractive and sucessful so if I can't get a man I must be failing at something?

Cat likes to think of herself as a nice person.

the other's self, that enormous hulking thing each possessed, that a self of course is not inconsequential. p124

It was probably middle-aged of me, to understand that sometimes there is nothing of any use to say.

For me God was something within that allowed me, occasionally, to see.

During these long periods of solitary contemplation in a setting of such dramatically haunting beauty, I found myself overcome by waves of loneliness.

I was stunned. I had only just met Stephen and for all his eccentricity I liked him. We both seemed shy in the presence of others, but were confident within ourselves. It was unthinkable that someone only a couple of years older than me should be facing the prospect of his own death. Mortality was not a concept that played any part in our existence. We were still young enough to be immortal.

You can learn more from watching the animals than you can from a guru or a minister — or from reading my book.

What do you think of yourself, your daily life, your body, your relationship with others? Ask yourself these questions. Write down the answers or speak them into a recorder. But in one way or another objectify them.

You prefer to identify with the part of you who watches television or cooks or works — the part you think knows what it is doing. But

You cannot learn about yourself by studying what is expected of you by others — but only by asking yourself what you expect of yourself, and discovering for yourself in what direction your abilities lie. End

If you are ill, remember when you were not. Search your life for proofs of your health.

usual. She walked to the couch and sat down, her eyes closed once again. She spoke rather slowly. The following is my reconstruction of the brief and somewhat enigmatic session.) There is no necessity for taking notes. There is something here that you

You must face yourself now. You cannot afford to play overlong—to hide yourself in trivia—to become so busy that you cannot hear the truth that shouts within you. I know what the transition is like and I tell you it is pleasant—but your responsibilities will still exist, and you will ask yourself how you have fulfilled them. You must know yourself if you would help others. You must look inward and listen.

If you want to know what you think of yourself, then ask yourself what you think of others, and you will find your answer.

The real power of books is their deep companionability. We learn from them as we learn from the deep companionability of love to know our own hearts and minds better.

she stretched and yawned, a suggestion of desire informing all her nerves. Extraordinary…not that she should feel desire but that she should not have felt it, consciously, for years.

I live in the desert of the heart. I can't love the whole damned world.

And she had gone off from her husband to live by herself with the priests, had she not? Does a man, seeing a trinket lying before him in the grass, fail to pick it up?

I'm not strange to myself, but I realize that I contrast with others fairly sharply.

She could not imagine what she could do to reconstruct all the things she enjoyed, and she could hardly remember what it was that she had enjoyed.

And then he saw what he was, an old man, ready to die, pressed against the Greenland earth, as small as an ash berry on the face of a mountain, and he did the only thing that men can do when they know themselves, which was to weep and weep and weep.

We watched the swimmers and sunbathers and I thought about this. Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts you were allowed to have faced. Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who've really faced the facts. The eerie feeling this thought gave me made me shiver in the hot wind.