Quotes About Introspection

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

I know that what girls do with their own clitorises in private isn't exactly my business, but this indifference to masturbation does bother me: if they don't touch themselves when they're alone, when do women connect with their own fantasies? How familiar are they with what really turns them on? And if you don't know that about yourself, what exactly do you know? What relationship can you have with yourself if you systematically hand your genitals over to someone else?

Se mira en un espejo, se encuentra hermosa. Es la primera vez que lo piensa al verse. Ahora es cierto, porque no hay nadie más que ella para juzgarlo. Ya no tiene que preguntarse qué pensará de ella el vecino de enfrente. Ha borrado del mapa a todos los vecinos de enfrente.

If a king goes mad, and runs about trying to find the king of his country, he will never find him, because he is the king himself.

the Vedanta says, a man who does not believe in himself is an atheist. Not believing

Plunge into the world, and then, after a time, when you have suffered and enjoyed all that is in it, will renunciation come; then will calmness come.

To turn the mind inside, stop it from going outside, and then to concentrate all its powers, and throw them upon the mind itself, in order that it may know its own nature, so that it will analyse itself, as it were, is indeed very hard work. Yet that is the only way to anything like a scientific approach towards the subject. Now

To the man who has begun to hate himself the gate to degeneration has already opened; and the same is true of a nation.

Once again, as it has with irregular regularity throughout my waking life, that sickening sense of language buried deep within comes coursing through arms, legs, chest, throat. If only I could make it reach the brain, the conversation with myself might perhaps begin.

Everyone who had ever cared to investigate the nature of human loneliness had seen that only one's own working mind breaks the solitude of the self.

Entonces nos sentamos juntas, en silencio, sin implicarnos la una con la otra, solo dos mujeres que escrutan la oscuridad de toda esa vida perdida. Mi madre no parece ni joven ni vieja, solo profundamente absorta por lo terrible de lo que ve ante sí. Y yo no sé qué soy a sus ojos.

i could not but be moved -- by the great and the humble alike -- to pity and admiration for those who demonstrated repeatedly that to ' be and do' is not a given.

She leans into the memory. She stares. She concentrates. What IS it that's she's looking for, trying to get straight at last?

The life we lead as writers is awful—it's boring, tedious, lonely," -Vivian Gornick

Those of us who crave the expressive but can't shake off the melancholy walk the street.

The age in which we live, this non-stop distraction, is making it more impossible for the young generation to ever have the curiosity or discipline... because you need to be alone to find out anything.

The great consolation in life is to say what one thinks.

Judge others by their questions rather than by their answers.

The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.

The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.