Quotes About Introspection

What if I had always known that the reason I looked different and felt different was in fact because I was different? It would be easy to fantasize that this would have been better. But we can never know what lies at the heart of the path not taken.

All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn't known: the secret was me.

She doesn't know how to talk about herself. She is very, very good at telling other people's stories. She is known, as a producer, to be an unusually good reader of scripts when it comes to character and motivation. She has an excellent sense of structure. But her cheeks redden and she stumbles when she tries to share in meetings. It's as if the whole of her life rushes in, and she doesn't know where to begin.

classically, naming a child is an opportunity for self-reflection.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.

This is a work of nonfiction.

The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: "There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

A psychoanalytic phrase—"unthought known"—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher

The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that's trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that's nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head. The hard work is in learning to step back and analyze the data dispassionately.

If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn't a bad metaphor for anxiety—as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose.

the feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that quickly winds itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of my body to itself.

I spent eighteen days entirely in widening and deepening my cave

But I, that was born to be my own destroyer...

the just reflections of conscience oftentimes snatch a man, especially a man of sense, from the arms of a mistress, as it did him at last, though on another occasion.

1. Knowing one's emotions. Self-awareness—recognizing a feeling as it happens—is the keystone of emotional intelligence. As

The sweet spot for smart decisions, then, comes not just from being a domain expert, but also from having high self-awareness.

the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An

The executive circuits that allow us to think about our own thoughts and to monitor the feelings that flow from them let us apply the same reasoning to other people´s minds when we choose to direct our attention that way

Lessening the grip of the self, always a major goal of meditation practitioners, has been oddly ignored by meditation researchers, who perhaps understandably focus instead on more popular benefits like relaxation and better health.

ser consciente de uno mismo significa «ser consciente de nuestros estados de ánimo y de los pensamientos que tenemos acerca de esos estados de ánimo».

el poeta escocés Robert Burns expresó perfectamente en el siguiente poema: ¡Ah, si nos fuera dado el poder de vernos como los demás nos ven! De cuántos disparates y necedades nos libraríamos.

They concluded that the brain's default activity—what happens automatically when nothing much else goes on—seems to be mulling over our relationships.18

Una de las características principales de la autoconciencia es un sentido del humor autocrítico.

Psychologists use the rather ponderous term metacognition to refer to an awareness of thought process, and metamood to mean awareness of one's own emotions. I prefer the term self-awareness, in the sense of an ongoing attention to one's internal states.