Quotes About Introspection

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. [ The Sick Chamber ( The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)]

We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.

The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud .

And, suddenly, it came home to me that I was a little man in a little ship, in the midst of a very great sea.

The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire.

Oh, yes. I'm terribly smart. Wouldn't it have been nice... to be intelligent?

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who, under a certain religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and, omitting all compliments and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty.

He wanted to feel as if he were—to play on his famous line from On the Waterfront—a "contender," someone who mattered, someone who had fought the good fight. He wanted to feel as if he had made a difference, left a mark, and not just on acting. What he did not want to be was an "unthinker," the way he described those people who never examined themselves or their place in the world.

It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.

The attempt at introspective analysis... is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see the darkness.

I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.

Cara untuk menjadi bijaksana adalah tahu apa yang harus dimaafkan.

I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths

the rhetorical formulas of objurgation with which I was to begin a page of inquiries of you: whether you were dead

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

This is too busy a world for us to stop and wonder whether a man wants what he does not ask for. Too many are clamoring loudly for what we cannot give...

I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.

He knows religion is bollocks," Collingswood said. "He just wishes he didn't.

I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter.

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

Once I said to my father, 'Why do you want me?' I still think that's the bravest thing I've ever done.

It is not they who have closed but I. I've cut myself away. I'm alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that I've not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that I was, already. How long has that been going on?