Quotes About Introspection

my feeling is that if you're not self-obsessed you're probably boring.

In all my life I'd never been approached this way, the car pulling up, the Where you going? It was something I wish had happened hundreds of times. I was a looker - someone who looked over at every car at every traffic light, hoping something would happen, and almost never finding anyone looking back - always everyone looking forwards, and every time I felt stupid. Why should people look at you? Why should they care?

And worse, you're not doing anything interesting anymore. You're not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird paradox is that you think you're at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant. I bet you haven't done anything offscreen in months. Have you?

Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do.

My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats, but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving.

Some days he climbed over the foothills of indifference to see the landscape of his life and future for what it was: mappable, traversable, achievable.

Why was he alive on Earth? Very often the meaning was obscured. Very often it required some digging. The meaning of his life was an elusive stream of water hundreds of feet below the surface, and he would periodically drop a bucket down the well, fill it, bring it up and drink from it. But this did not sustain him for long.

I know forever they will be in my house, the rooms of my mind, I know this and I have accepted this but while I know they will be there I want them dead there. I cannot have them breathing there! I want them in the floirboards of the basement of my soul.

Then why are you talking about exhibitionism? It's a ridiculous term. Someone wants to celebrate their existence and you call it exhibitionism. It's niggardly. If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air.

How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can't decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting.

You're not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird paradox is that you think you're at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant. I bet you haven't done anything offscreen in months.

I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose—that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster.

Oscar Wilde wrote, Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascination... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write.

Don't flatter yourself to think this is your doing. Your problem is that you think things have happened for the first time to you, and that you're the fulcrum from which all people and the current world pivot.

But you already know me pretty well by now! Helena said, and then directed her to her own profile page.

En de hele tijd streelde ik alle muren van mijn hoofd, met tranen in mijn ogen van vreugde, melancholie zelfs. Ik was verzot op de oppervlakten, de vele kamers - de oude en de lege kamers.

Il significato della sua vita era un'inafferrabile vena d'acqua centinaia di metri sotto la superficie, e periodicamente lui calava un secchio nel pozzo, lo riempiva, lo tirava su e beveva. Ma questo non lo sosteneva molto a lungo.

I'm better than you think. I'm even better than I think I am.

My feeling is, if you're not self-obsessed you're probably boring.

Am I just curious? Or do I want this? And if I did want this, what sort of person am I?

Rule #9: You're unlikely to regret much of what you don't say.

the left is now characterized by a weird form of self-flagellation.

Laugh at both the state of the world and at ourselves. In doing so, it allows us to acknowledge our flaws while also transcending them.

losing a debate isn't a sign of stupidity or weakness, but a sign of growth if you're willing to embrace it with humility. I