Quotes About Introspection

I'm a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy.

I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.

I played an unsympathetic part -- myself.

Take the time to understand what's behind your success. It's the best way to ensure it will continue.

I am a Beginner. What the others are I don't really know. All I know is I am wiped out every six months or so. I die. I have died hundreds and hundreds of times. It is always the same death. I do not know what dies. Why must I always begin again and again – always the same high hopes, the identical death?

Christ, will I ever find someone who is not crying inside?

My job is writing poems, reading them out loud, getting them printed, studying, learning how to become the kind of man who has something of worth to say. It's a great job. Naturally I'm starving to death

I was home alone watching George Bush speak on television. So it was just really the two of us. And as I listened to him, I realized, that one of us ... was nuts! And for the first time ever, I went "Wow, it's not me!"

These places are not wilderness; the "unknown" lies inside us.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

"I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir," said Alice, "because I'm not myself, you see.""I don't see," said the Caterpillar.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

Erik Erikson has commented: Potentially creative men like (Bernard) Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, at last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden.

To the outside observer, deep thinking may appear methodically compulsive, but it is much more the product of a person's faith in himself and his emotional inclinations than the result of any objective discipline. Hence James' descriptive phrase: "the sentiment of rationality.

Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.

I don't know if you noticed, but our two-party system is a bowl of shit looking in the mirror at itself.

Spiritual practice is more about questions than answers, more about searching than finding, more about effort than accomplishment.

I don't need to be a frontman all the time, and in fact, the older I get, the less of an urge it is inside me to play that role. I've still got it inside me, and I do occasionally allow it out.

I realized that even though I had this urge, this longing, to write about other people, in order for it to be emotionally gripping, I needed to be in there somehow.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.