Quotes About Introspection

When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

Don't be afraid of poetry.

There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing. I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.

No man can walk away from his own story

A man's got to know his limitations.

What you think about me says more about you than it does about me.

Here is a list of terrible things, The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings The rabid bite of the dogs of war, The voice of one who went before, But most of all the mirror's gaze, Which counts us out our numbered days.

We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.

Finally you get to the age when a book's power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it.

If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.

Why should I waste my imagination on myself? —SERGEI DIAGHILEV

Socrates, after all, said that the unexamined life was not worth living. He might have added, however, that continual self-examination would leave us no time to live.

A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.

Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring.

No cries, no convulsions, nothing more than a face fixed in thought. The gods no longer existed, Christ didn't exist yet, and there was, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment in which man was alone. —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, IN AN 1861

Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

more typical essay is the one on Karl Kraus, of which Kraus confessed that the only thing he understood was that it was about him.

Chesterton once said, on the subject of innate human dignity, that it all depended on the presence of the holy spirit, and that it was otherwise hard to take the human body seriously, belonging as it did to a creature that nourished itself by pushing food into a hole at the bottom of its face.

Obviously, I'm attracted to heavier movies.

The most holy person is most in touch with his own depravity and, consequently, with the great mercy and kindness of God. In a sense he has grown downward, not upward; he is humbled, not exalted.

Now if I seem to be afraid To live the life that I have made in song Well it's just that I've been losing so long.