Quotes About Introspection

sentence-by-sentence basis—that it's okay if a person

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us deep down. It's our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of.

you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That

most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That

The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees.

X secretly castigates himself and wonder where his basic decency and compassion are.

Manhãs de escala são um momento especial para o semiagorafóbico, porque quase todo mundo deixa o navio e vai para a terra firme participar de Passeios Organizados ou fazer turismo peripatético espontâneo e os conveses superiores da e.m. Nadir assumem a mesma qualidade fantasmagórica e misteriosa da sua casa quando você é criança, adoece e fica em casa quando todo mundo saiu para o trabalho ou a escola etc.

David Foster Wallace

Gately's never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody's hand except to say the Our Father in a big circle.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it's just words.

what words and terms might be applied to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be? How was she to decide and describe—even to herself, looking inward and facing herself—what all she'd so painfully learned said about her?

It is at once too noisy and too quiet to do any real work, and I have no ideas that do not seem to me shallow and overwrought.

tends to put us before the television and its one-way window

What Mark Nechtr fears most: solipsistic solipsism: silence.

What put him there, here and now, for you to see, is that he can't be seen. That's what the whole thing's about, now. That no one is really the way they have to be seen.

My husband laughed without smiling. He looked at the last of the sun-colored water as we approached the Brooklyn Bridge's system of angled shadows. If no one is really the way we see them, that would include me, I said. And you. Rudy admired the sunset. He said it looked explosive, hanging, all round, just over the water. Reflected and doubled in that bit of river. But he was looking only at the water. I saw him.

es la libertad que entraña la verdadera educación, el aprender a ser equilibrado: que puedes decidir conscientemente qué tiene sentido y qué no lo tiene. Puedes decidir a qué dioses adorar…

Probablemente lo más peligroso que tiene la educación académica, por lo menos en mi caso, es que habilita mi tendencia a intelectualizar las cosas en exceso, a perderme en el pensamiento abstracto en lugar de limitarme a prestar atención a lo que está pasando delante de mí. Y en lugar de prestar atención a lo que está pasando dentro de mí.

Lo que intento decir es que pienso que esto forma parte de lo que se supone que significa en realidad ese mantra de que las humanidades «te enseñan a pensar»: ser un poco menos arrogante, tener cierta «conciencia crítica» de mí mismo y de mis certidumbres… porque un gran porcentaje de las cosas de las que suelo estar automáticamente seguro resultan ser completamente erróneas y fruto de engañarme a mí mismo.

Supongo que ser tímido significa básicamente estar absorbido por uno mismo hasta el punto en que estar rodeado de otras personas se hace realmente difícil

Humility is nothing else but a right judgment of ourselves.

Loneliness came over him, like an avalanche of snow. He was alone. Where he had always wanted to be. You can only trust yourself. There's a rat buried deep in everybody and they'll rat on you if they get pushed far enough.

If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations...

How lonely we are in the world; how selfish and secret, everybody!