Quotes About Introspection

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She wanted too much to live herself.

How can one feel well when one is suffering in moral sense? Can any sensitive person find peace of mind nowadays?

During this journey it was as if he again thought over his whole life and reached the same old comforting and hopeless conclusion: that there was no need for him to start anything, that he had to live out his life without doing evil, without anxiety, and without wishing for anything.

Levin felt that in his soul, in the very bottom of his soul, his brother Nikolai, despite the ugliness of his life, was not more in the wrong than those who despised him.

The girls noticed that Volodia, who was generally so talkative and gay, seldom spoke now and never smiled and on the whole did not seem glad to be at home. He only addressed his sisters once during dinner and then his remark was strange. He pointed to the samovar and said: "In California they drink gin instead of tea." He, too, seemed to be busy with thoughts of his own, and, to judge from the glances that the two boys occasionally exchanged, their thoughts were identical.

When he had joined the Freemasons he had experienced the feeling of one who confidently steps onto the smooth surface of a bog. When he put his foot down it sank in. To make quite sure of the firmness of the ground, he put his other foot down and sank deeper still, became stuck in it, and involuntarily waded knee-deep in the bog.

If you want to be a clever person, you have to learn how to ask cleverly, how to listen attentively, how to respond quietly, and how to stop talking when there is nothing more to say.

The prayers to which she surrendered herself most of all were those of repentance. On her way home at an early hour when she met no one but bricklayers going to work or men sweeping the street, and everybody within the houses was still asleep, Natasha experienced a feeling new to her, a sense of the possibility of correcting her faults, the possibility of a new, clean life, and of happiness.

We often believe that our life moves forward only when we meet others. This is not true. Our real lives unfold when we are alone, when we are one-on-one with our thoughts. A thought is a great force. This force finds its way out of a person through words, making one's deeds a blessing or a curse, depending on whether it was a good or bad thought. It

No matter what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in the same place.

O ye, who see perplexities over your heads, beneath your feet, and to the right and left of you; you will be an eternal enigma unto yourselves until ye become humble and joyful as children.

Böyle i?te, diyordu. Dostumuz Konstantin Dmitriç ne yetenekli bir gençti. Oysa ?imdi nerede o eski Konstantin Dmitriç! O zamanlar bilimi de severdi. Üniversiteden ç?kt???nda insanlara özgü dü?ünceleri vard?. ?imdi ise yeteneklerinin yar?s? kendi kendini aldatmaya, öteki yar?s? da bu aldat??? hakl? göstermeye yönelmi? durumda. ileti?im yay?nlar?. syf :441.

An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle.

Acaso não somos todos nós largados neste mundo só para odiarmos uns aos outros e, portanto, para atormentarmos a nós mesmos e aos outros?

No, I can't argue with them; they wear impenetrable armour, while I'm naked.

If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself.

Se detuvo y contempló las copas de los álamos, mecidas por el viento,con sus hojas mojadas y relucientes bajo el sol frío, y comprendió que no la perdonarían, que todo el mundo sería inmisericorde con ella,como ese cielo y ese follaje.

I would not take a young man to a lock-hospital to knock the hankering after women out of him, but into my soul to see the devils that were rending it.

For a long time afterwards, in prison, when moral change took place in me, I thought of that moment, recalled what I could of it, and considered it. I remembered for an instant, before the action I had a terrible consciousness I was killing a defenseless woman, my wife!

The time for fooling himself was over: something new and dreadful was going on inside Ivan Ilyich, something significant, more significant than anything in his whole life. And he was the only one who knew it; the people around him didn't know, or didn't want to know-they thought that everything in the world was going on as before. This was what tormented Ivan Ilyich more than anything.

O lo que yo llamaba racional no lo era tanto como había pensado, o lo que me parecía irracional no lo era tanto como había pensado.

the mere fact of the death of a near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who heard of it the complacent feeling that, "it is he who is dead and not I.

When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I.

When he did not think, but simply lived, he was continually aware of the presence of an infallible judge in his soul, determining which of two possible courses of action was the better and which was the worse, and as soon as he did not act rightly, he was at once aware of it.