Quotes About Introspection

Who knows what beats deeply within the hearts of people?

When he ate out, he ate alone. He didn't shop

You can't live someone else's life for them. Hell, it's hard enough living your own.

And she said no more as they drove along right into the gathering storm that might as well have been inside the car as well as outside it.

in this house, speaking and thinking

A squatter for life is inhabiting my mind. And he happens to be me.

sort of thing. Think you

think we've all

You may not even have known that you had an assumption. It was only because he came up with the opposite one that you find out that you have one. You may uncover other assumptions, but we are all suspending them and looking at them all, seeing what they mean.

Your questions contain hidden assumptions; that's the point. Therefore, when you question the question itself, you may be questioning a deeper assumption. But that's done non-verbally. Do you see what I mean? To question the question eventually has to be a non-verbal act, which you can't describe.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

Blackstar, two days before his death. And interestingly, that record was a kind of self-interview—Bowie's most fearless and open of them all, wherein he answers the ultimate hard question "What is it like to be dying?"—and reveals in poetic detail what had meaning to him in his life Ã¢â'¬Â¦ while addressing his audience with a certain innate gratitude as he says goodbye.

All I ask is Ã¢â'¬Â¦ ponder with open minds. We've made so many mistakes, humanity, during just one lifetime. Many of them perpetrated not by evildoers, drenched in malice, but by men and women filled with fine motives! Like you.

That's not how human psychology works. No, we tend to do lots of things without knowing why. We need excuses, though, so we rationalize! If an obvious reason for our behavior isn't readily available, we invent one, preferably one that helps us think better of ourselves.

one of the most fascinating and effective kinds of lying is self-deception.

It takes great wisdom, maturity, and force of will to overcome ingrained human egotism and say -- "Hey, I can fool myself! I might even be wrong, from time to time." 

As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.

As I sit today, I am a genuine, often pleasant person. I am able to imitate a human being for long spurts of time, do solid work for a reputable organization, and have, over the breadth of time, proven to be an attentive father and husband. So how to reconcile my past with my current circumstances? Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

that explains everything and excuses nothing.

But I've seen enough to know that we all carry a measure of guilt and innocence among us.

Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to stare. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

So did Katagiri fail, and am I a failure because I can't remember what Buddhism is—and are all the rest of us failures, as it seems, when contrasted against our early pure and simple expectations and the clear-cut enlightenment of the story books?

For the first time, I saw my behavior from someone else's point of view.