Quotes About Introspection

For we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It's as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can.

In short, I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar, which I responded to in my usual fashion by arming myself with a gin and tonic, my first of the evening. I

What makes us human is that we're the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves

I was not a bastard, I was not, I was not, I was not, unless, somehow, I was.

But after the bottle was empty sometime that night, I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go. Now

I was not a bastard, I was not a bastard, I was not, I was not, I was not, unless, somehow, I was.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That sounds good, but things are never that simple. The problem, you see, is how to know what we want to have done to us.

Gradually, as my bruised forehead healed, and as I absorbed my own words, I developed a growing sympathy for the man in these pages, the intelligence operative of doubtful intelligence. Was he a fool or too smart for his own good? Had he chosen the right side or the wrong side of history? And were not these the questions we should all ask ourselves? Or was it only me and myself who should be so concerned?

Writing was entering into fog, feeling my way for a route from this world to the unearthly world of words, a route easier to find on some days than others.

Why should I worry about deviating from the masses when I am also me and myself? Am I not a mass? Am I not already a collective? Do I not contain multitudes? Am I not a universe unto myself? Am I not always infinitely dialectical as I synthesize the thesis of me and the antithesis of myself?

while pain is universal, it is also utterly private.

We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts. Have

But after the bottle was empty sometime that night, I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go.

Becoming stupider was a consequence of age for which he was unprepared. With

No matter whether my eyes were open or shut, I could still see it, the crapulent major's third eye, weeping because of what it could see about me.

Yes, I am flawed, we are all flawed, even you, but I blame my flaws on the fact that all my life I only ever aspired to one thing—to be human. That was my first mistake, since I was already human, a fact not always recognized by others.

He tried to forget what he'd discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake.

Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself. Yet that's where revolutions start!

There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, ever.

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.

You have been counting rosary beads for an era But the wandering of your mind does not halt Forsake the beads in your hand And start moving the beads of your heart.

Never judge a man's actions until you know his motives

I'm not a mouse or a tigress, she thought, I'm a hedgehog.

Perhaps it is true that for all the evidence of the mirror, one pictures oneself in some deep niche of the mind as forever 18.