Quotes About Introspection

I started looking back and now understand how wrong I was.

I am going to meet people today who talk too much—people who are selfish, egotistical, ungrateful. But I won't be surprised or disturbed, for I couldn't imagine a world without such people.

If we know we are going to be rebuked anyhow, isn't it far better to beat the other person to it and do it ourselves? Isn't it much easier to listen to self-criticism than to bear condemnation from alien lips?

Sólo sé que no sé nada".

Bien, escuche. Yo pienso de otro modo, pero quizá me equivoque. Me equivoco con tanta frecuencia... Y si me equivoco, quiero corregir mi error.

People are not interested in you. They are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves—morning, noon and after dinner.

If Al Capone, Two Gun Crowley, Dutch Schultz, and the desperate men and women behind prison walls don't blame themselves for anything - what about the people with whom you and I come in contact?

The divinity that shapes our ends is in ourselves. It is our very self…. All that a man achieves is the direct result of his own thoughts…. A man can only rise, conquer and achieve by lifting up his thoughts. He can only remain weak and abject and miserable by refusing to lift up his thoughts.

I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let's examine the facts.

it is turning us into shallower thinkers

sólo estamos despiertos a medias.

Instead of waiting for our enemies to criticize us or our work, let's beat them to it. Let's be our own most severe critic. Let's find and remedy all our weaknesses before our enemies get a chance to say a word.

Desconfíe de su primera impresión instintiva. Nuestra primera reacción natural en una situación desagradable es ponernos a la defensiva. Puede ser para peor, no para mejor.

If I knew your thoughts, I would know what you are, for your thoughts make you who you are. By changing our thoughts, we can change our lives.

I got up at sunrise and was happy; I walked, and was happy; I roamed the forests and hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I did nothing, I worked in the garden, I picked the fruit, I helped in the house, and happiness followed me everywhere — happiness which could not be referred to any definite object, but dwelt entirely within myself and which never left me a single instant. — JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU SWISS-BORN ESSAYIST

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. — HENRY DAVID THOREAU AMERICAN NATURALIST

It is not a bad exercise for a man to sit quiet once in a while and watch the workings of his mind and heart and notice how often he can find himself favoring five or six of the seven deadly sins, and especially the first of those sins, which is named pride. — CARL SANDBURG AMERICAN POET

Very few of us ever walk in the fields and the woods, not talking or singing songs, but just walking quietly and observing things about us and within ourselves. — J. KRISHNAMURTI INDIAN PHILOSOPHER

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak. — SPINOZA DUTCH PHILOSOPHER

Why do you suppose those moments of solitude offer us such relief ? … Because they give us a chance to simply be ourselves, to enjoy what and where we are, to savor just being. Alone with God, we feel no need to perform, to do. — FRANK BIANCO AMERICAN JOURNALIST/PHOTOGRAPHER

It was an important day in my life when at last I understood that if he needed forty days in the wilderness at one point, I very likely could use three or four.

The hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what is driving it. Our "within" is astonishingly complex and subtle—even devious. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we would do.

And if you are already flying upside down and don't know it, your cleverness will do you little good.

The best physical, chemical, and other scientific knowledge will not tell us what to do and who to be.