Quotes About Introspection

Choice of attention--to pay attention to this and ignore that--is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

For the others, like me, there is only the flash Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass To meet one's madness

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.

An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

Every man carries within him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow. A parlor game for a wet afternoon – imaging the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever one looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

Just as a good man forgets his deed the moment he has done it, a genuine writer forgets a work as soon as he has completed it and starts to think about the next one; if he thinks about his past work at all, he is more likely to remember its faults than its virtues. Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

If a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer 'writer' for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer poetry would embarrass us both.

And how reliable can any truth be that is got By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?

The great vice of our age […] is that we are all not only 'actors' but know that we are ('reduplicated Hamlets'), and that it is only at moments, in spite of ourselves, and when we least expect it, that our real feelings break through.

My name on the title-page seems a pseudonym for someone else, someone talented but near the border of sanity...

Look into my eyes, and you will see me there--all, all that is in my heart.' 'Oh, I know what I should see there!'...'What would you see? Tell me?' 'There is a little black ball in the middle of your eye; I should see myself in it no bigger than that,' and she marked off about an eighth of her little finger-nail. 'There is a pool in the wood, and I look down and see myself there. That is better. Just as large as I am--not small and black like a small, small fly.

To forget the past so easily seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever increasing collection of past selves- those dear, dead gentlemen who one after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and modestly to rest.

Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another.

The work is to somehow talk ourselves beyond / the sleepiness of selfhood

I have no way of telling what I miss I am the only one who misses it

turning the pages patiently in search of meanings

I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.

If you don't laugh at all, you've missed the point. If you only laugh, you've missed your chance from illumination.

It's really something for people who are approaching 30 to take a look at what that means to them. I think turning 30 is a chance to re-identify with yourself.

I wanted to give my first instincts a chance without shooting them down immediately, which I sometimes do.

If you can figure out how you're feeling, then maybe you have a chance of getting over it.