Quotes About Introspection

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.

My mom being a psychotherapist, I've been brought up with that whole psychoanalytical terrain.

We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us.

Being reflective also means listening to your inner self with new ears. The truth is, we think we've heard our own story so much that we stop listening to it! We become like the people in our lives who we complain don't listen to us. With reflection, we listen freshly to our selves, the way we would like to be listened to. There

The slumber of the "I" is at the root of most suffering.

The most important question of all, surprisingly, is not, "Do I love my partner?" It is, "Do I like the me that I am when I'm with him?" Do

You listen to the silence drawn on the ashes of ancient sacrifices.

I'm always ashamed when I discover how well-read other people are and how ignorant I am in comparison. If you saw the long list of famous books and authors I've never read you wouldn't believe it. My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I'm reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of the page 20, say, I realize I can recite page 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.

purely hated myself because I hadn't bothered to ask his name. People oughtn't to breeze into your life and out again in ten seconds, without leaving even a name behind. As Mr. Dickens once pointed out, we're all on our way to the grave together.

Feedback tells us how we are really being perceived, so if we are not getting it, we need to ask for it.

Her eyes were bottomless wells that led to the permafrost of her soul." She

What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.

he went on strike and withdrew into the sulking corner of the religiously disappointed.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

In a way that starry night sky is a mirror in which we see our own faces.

Et mi-rêvant, je ne sais guère Si c'est moi qui t'écris, ou toi…

I should die some day. Had I ever thought of it? I reflected. No, I had never thought of it. I could not. You can no more look destiny in the face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is grey.

I am more sensitive than other people. Things that other people would not notice awaken a distinct echo in me, and in such moments of lucidity, when I look at myself, I see that I am alone, all alone, all alone.

We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine.

love is only a kind of festival of solitude

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.

all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.

we shall not dwell for the present on the effort to delve down to the depths of our being. If possible at all, it is exceptional: and it is on the surface, at the point where it inserts itself into the close-woven tissue of other exteriorised personalities, that our ego generally finds its point of attachment; its solidity lies in this solidarity.