Quotes About Introspection

Only when your inner life is right will your outer life be right as well.

Isabel saw all their lives becoming history in units of days and nights so fatally private there was no one left for her to love.

I have this sense of being a prematurely old man in a quarrel with himself over the worth of his life, a hopelessly bullshit notion.

What will I die with in my hand? A paintbrush (for houses), an M15 a hammer or ax, a book a gavel, a candlestick tiptoeing upstairs. What will I hold or will I be caught with this usual thing that I want to be my heart but it is my brain and I turn it over and over and over.

There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything. I sat down on the ground to avoid tipping over from the enormity of it all.

She wasn't trying to overcome life, only to get along with it, to blend with the processes she could scarcely understand in a world that had permitted her no solid ground.

I prefer the skyline of a shelf of books.

After the passing of irresistible music you must make do with a dripping faucet.

I lean against the rail and think there much be such a thing as beautiful anxiety.

There can be a wonderful substratum of thinking going on beneath the banal tonnage of human behavior. Perhaps

Sitting there on the deck during intermittent periods of dozing I thought that it's really hard on a soul to admit how much of life we have spent being full of shit.

Naturally, both sides of the family seemed utterly normal to me at the time but a great deal less so in retrospect.

While it is a truism that man has not learned much more than the sexual act, and that fire burns when you stick your hand into it, it behooves the scholar to immerse himself in the analyses of the problem, rather than the problem itself. One

With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open, while our eyes are turned in ward," said

Man, I'm sick of doubt.

Out here on the perimeter there are no stars. Out here we is stoned. Immaculate.

But I always hesitate, unwilling to take a leap into the unknown. Because I can't tell which will burn more... The flames surrounding me... or the fire within.

I knew–though I didn't recognize the fact–that I wasn't all right.

It had soaked in on him at last, the spot he was in. Soaked clear through a quart of booze until it hit him where he lived and rubbed the place raw.

A real Irishman will give everything of himself--except that kernel of his soul which makes him a mystery to other peoples.

If evil in this world is deeply human and very real, and religious people believe it is, it just doesn't make spiritual sense to suggest that the evil all lies "out there" with our adversaries and enemies, and none of it is "in here" with us—embedded in our own attitudes, behaviors, and policies.

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.

When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.

Prejudice," Rickey told the table. "It reflects an attitude of a great many people in this country who don't introspect themselves very closely about their own prejudices. . . . You can't meet it with words. You can't take prejudice straight on. It must be done by proximity. Proximity! The player alongside you. No matter what the skin color or language. Win the game. Win all. Get the championship and the check that goes with it.