Quotes About Introspection

Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.

We become what we behold.

Thou art a man God is no more Thy own humanity Learn to adore

If you have form'd a Circle to go into, / Go into it yourself & see how you would do.

Each man is haunted until his humanity awakens.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

Are there aspects of our lives - things we do, feel and think - that we daren't confess, even to ourselves, even in the absolute privacy of our private record.

What can I know? Nothing for sure. What ought I to do? Try not to hurt anyone. What may I hope for? For the best (but it won't make any difference).

All great artists are doubters.

Mr Lysander Rief looks like someone who is far more at ease occupying the cold security of the dark; a man happier with the dubious comfort of the shadows.

what is it about me and basements? Why do I like the semi-subterranean life?

David Gascoyne once told me that the only point of keeping a journal was to concentrate of the personal, the diurnal minutiae, and forget the great significant events in the world at large.

Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.

Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us. It is our inability to communicate to another how we are locked within ourselves, unable to say the simplest thing of importance to one another, any of us, even the most valuable, that makes our lives like those of a litter of kittens in a wood-pile.

I have had my dream—like others— And it has come to nothing, so that I remain now carelessly With feet planted on the ground, And look up at the sky— Feeling my clothes about me, The weight of my body in my shoes, The rim of my hat, air passing in and out At my nose—and decide to dream no more.

To hell with everything I myself have ever written.

the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires—unroused.

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr. Paterson has gone away to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees his thoughts sitting and standing. His thoughts alight and scatter– Who are these people (how complex the mathematic) among whom I see myself in the regularly ordered plateglass of his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?

Silence can be complex too, but you do not get far with silence.

The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care?

I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! — William Carlos Williams, from "Danse Russe," The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939 , edited by Christopher MacGowan.

But though I have felt free only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell -- a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear