Quotes About Introspection

You'll become a lot better if you think about your death.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!

No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.

Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity.

Children are mirrors; they will always show you exactly what is going on inside of you. Each phase of their growth is an opportunity to heal your own pain, to go deeper inside yourself and become more truly human

No offence Mitch, but you look like s*****." "I feel like s****

I may have implied on several occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven't decided yet what I am or who I am.

To begin with self-consciousness is to begin with the proposition, "I exist.

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.

I'm such a nobody.

There was a sentence in your letter that struck me, "I wish I were far away from everything, I am the cause of all, and bring only sorrow to everybody, I alone have brought all this misery on myself and others." These words struck me because that same feeling, just the same, not more nor less, is also on my conscience.

So what do you want? Does what happens inside show on the outside? There is such a great fire in one's soul, and yet nobody ever comes to warm themselves there, and passersby see nothing but a little smoke coming from the top of the chimney, and go on their way.

We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: "He is the one." But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.

I'll start with the small things

I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.

For me, life may well continue in solitude. I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly.

What I am in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.

One begins by plaguing oneself to no purpose in order to be true to nature, and one concludes by working quietly from one's own palette alone, and then nature is the result.

There are often beams in our eye that we know not of. Let us therefore ask that our eye may become single, for then we ourselves shall become wholly single.

What am I in the eyes of most people? A good-for-nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, somebody who has no position in society and never will have. Very well, even if that were true, I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody.

Dans chaque vie où de la pluie doit tomber, quelques jours seront sombres et lugubres – c'est vrai, il ne peut en aller autrement, et pourtant je me demande si le nombre de jours sombres et lugubres peut parfois devenir trop grand ? La lutte intérieure de Van Gogh: Sa vie, son Å"uvre et sa maladie mentale - Liesbeth Heenk

I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away.