Quotes About Introspection

We are like a man who goes round a castle seeking in vain for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the facades. If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own minds we shall perhaps have the key to the external world. 

He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.59 Such

physical philosophers; they had sought for the physis or nature of external things, the laws and constituents of the material and measurable world. That is very good, said Socrates; but there is an infinitely worthier subject for philosophers than all these trees and stones, and even all those stars; there is the mind of man. What is man, and what can he become?

Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage, and philosophers do not marry.

A book is a friend that will do what no friend does - be silent when we wish to think.

When the Duke of Wei offered him the prime ministry he dismissed the royal messengers with a curtness indicative of a writer's dreams: "Go away quickly, and do not soil me with your presence. I had rather amuse and enjoy myself in a filthy ditch than be subject to the rules and restrictions in the court of a sovereign.

if you are alone, you are all your own; with a companion you are half yourself; so you squander yourself according to the indiscretion of your company.

It would be better to abandon our overrapid development of the intellect, and to aim rather at training the heart and the affections

He thought everything out carefully before acting; and therefore remained a bachelor all his life long.

His only occupation is to contemplate the essence of things; and since he himself is the essence of all things, the form of all forms, his sole employment is the contemplation of himself. 40 Poor Aristotelian God!—

Works like this are as a mirror: if an ass looks in you cannot expect an angel to look out";

The man who does not wish to be merely one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.

Every philosopher should be an athlete. If he is not, let us suspect his philosophy.

Sometimes," said Thoreau, "as I drift idly on Walden Pond, I cease to live and begin to be.

Philosophy begins when one doubts one's own beliefs, dogmas, and axioms

Know in thyself and All one self-same soul; banish the dream that sunders part from whole.

we must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves

with the morbid realisation that his sexual being was a dull thing, a lifeless thing, a mass-produced marionette with chipped paint and fraying strings

If I were dying when I should've, say in the late sixties, when I thought my head would explode with howling misery, when every time their father opened his fat mouth I thought I'd have to kill him, then – then I would've written the girls affectionate letters, telling them of my sadness, and how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them. Too late. They're here, they're grown-up, they're crap, and so we'll bicker towards oblivion.

We typically have a bias that tells us we are less susceptible to bias than everyone else.

we go through our social lives convinced that everything we are saying, doing and feeling is being closely examined by those around us even though, in reality, they are all preoccupied with themselves, equally convinced the spotlight is on them.

I was aware and increasingly suspicious of the separation between the things i felt and the voice that interpreted those feelings. We really are, as people sometimes glibly say, a mystery to ourselves. we really are

I'm thinking that, collectively, men are only slightly more observant than mollusks.

Until a person has discovered and dares to follow his own inner gleam, we may be sure of one thing: he will be leaning in either negative or positive dependence on someone outside himself!