Quotes About Introspection

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Je comprends ce que j'aime, et ne comprends pas ce que je n'aime pas. Et, comme j'aime peu, au bout du compte je ne comprends pas grand'chose.

El talento se desarrolla en la soledad; el carácter, en el río de la vida".

Goethe: "El talento se desarrolla en la soledad; el carácter, en el río de la vida".

the people who dwell in the land of dimness, the people who could not see themselves except as formless shadows moving in a mist, the people who had gouged out their own eyes to keep from looking at themselves in the mirror, these people, these glorious people were none other than ourselves: The Americans.

The world is] a wonderful place to live and lots more wonderful if you live in such a way that you can live with yourself.

What have you done?

Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone ...

A great deal of what passes for current Christianity consists in denouncing other people's vices and faults.

It is telling that in the Dictionary he offers under 'bristly' this heavily edited quotation from the brilliant but erratic classicist Richard Bentley: 'If the eye were so acute as to rival the finest microscope, the sight of our own selves would affright us; the smoothest skin would be beset with rugged scales and bristly hairs.

I'm no romantic, surfing, California boy. I like reading, writing, philosophizing. Scheming. I've been doing some exploration of the inner space.

I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

Then we shall riseAnd view ourselves with clearer eyesIn that calm region where no nightCan hide us from each other's sight.

Thou art the book,The library whereon I look.

The essence of this man -- Richard M. Nixon is loneliness.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook.

Oh, my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways, And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low, I'm at home and at ease on a track that I know not, And restless and lost on a road that I know.

Oh, my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways, And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low, I'm at home and at ease on a track that I know not, And restless and lost on a road that I know.

I was human, very human, and if in the days misspent I have injured man or woman, it was done without intent. If at times I blundered blindly — bitter heart and aching brow — If I wrote a line unkindly — I am sorry for it now.