Quotes About Introspection

For the first time in my life, which had for years been sometimes witlessly gregarious, I discovered the pain of unwanted solitude. Like a felon suddenly thrown into solitary confinement, I found myself feeding off the unburned fat of inward resources I barely knew I possessed.

And I think it was a great Frenchman, Voltaire, who said that the beginning of wisdom is the moment when one understands how little concerned with one's own life are other men, they who are so desperately preoccupied with their own. I knew nothing about you and that boy, nothing at all.

In my career as a writer I have always been attracted to morbid themes—suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery.

outrageously at his temples (by then his need to do something had become like a panic, a fierce drive up ward and outward from his self that had begun to cut like flame through the boozy dreamland, the nit-picking, the inertia, the navel-gazing), said loudly and impatiently: "What do you mean there is not a hope in the world?

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Ché la diritta via era smarrita. In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right path.

A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self—a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it.

For me the real healers were seclusion and time.

It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and all but a stranger to death…I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation.

Would he ever, he wondered, escape from people who banged on the doors he locked to demand his egress?

Then he undressed and brushed his teeth. He examined his face in the slightly tarnished looking-glass above the wash-basin. He was fifty-seven, but according to this reflection older. His face would seem younger if he put on a bit of weight; chubbiness could be made to cover a multitude of sins. But he didn't want that; he liked being thought of as beyond things.

She thought of death and of her own in particular: the death of her body and the death of her face.

Studdy was thinking that the creature was an animal; he was saying to himself that it was surely in error that she had become a member of the human race.

The balcony is a metaphor for a mental and emotional place of perspective, calm, and self-control. If life is a stage and we are all actors on that stage, then the balcony is a place from which we can see the entire play unfolding with greater clarity. To observe our selves, it is valuable to go to the balcony at all times, and especially before, during, and after any problematic conversation or negotiation.

INTRODUCTION THE FIRST NEGOTIATION Let him who would move the world first move himself. —SOCRATES

the secret to listening to others is to listen to ourselves first?

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

have found that this journey from no to yes with myself is not a single trip, but ultimately a lifelong journey. I have been on this journey for a long time and expect to be on it for as long as I live.

Let him who would move the world first move himself. —SOCRATES

then found a bench in a

A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

When from our better selves we have too long Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop, Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, How gracious, how benign, is Solitude

How strange, she thought, that she could hate and love in the same breath.

But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence

I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed