Quotes About Introspection

The important thing was to forget about Iris's hair and let her speak, let her find her fluency and, from the soft streaming of her own words, create for him his apologia.

You do only the right thing, the right thing and the right thing and the right thing, going back all the way. You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accomodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sense of life?

The drive was interminable. Had he missed a turn or was this itself the next abode: a coffin that you endlessly steer through the placeless darkness, recounting and recounting the uncontrollable events that induced you to become someone unforeseen. And so fast! So quickly! Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.

But then I thought, Why bestow on him all this thinking? Why the appetite to know this guy? Ravenous because once upon a time he said to you and to you alone, "Basketball was never like this, Skip"? Why clutch at him? What's the matter with you? There's nothing here but what you're looking at.

They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.

Self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves be parties.

It's very hard to master and if you're not learning all the time, you will fail. That being said, humility in the face of the game is extremely different than humility in the face of your opponents.

Knowing what we don't know is better than thinking we know what we don't.

On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka "nested dolls" that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)

A wise sufferer will look not inward, but outward. There is no more effective healer than a wounded healer, and in the process the wounded healer's own scars may fade away.

Along with Chesterton, I've had to take my place among those who acknowledge that we are what is wrong with the world. What is my snobbishness toward my childhood church, for instance, but an inverted form of the harsh judgment it showed me?

In other words, the proof of spiritual maturity is not how 'pure' you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.

The worst moment for the atheist is

Be careful," warned Nietzsche, "lest in fighting the dragon you become the dragon." I

As a Christian, my main concern is not to downgrade others' beliefs but to examine my own.

On the other hand, if the subject had nothing to do but think about his pain (as is true in many hospitals and nursing homes), he showed much greater sensitivity.

We cannot make Him visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him," said Abraham Joshua Heschel

La única sabiduría que podemos esperar adquirir es la sabiduría de la humildad. La humildad no tiene límite. —T. S. ELLIOT

God already knows who we are; we are the ones who must find a way to come to terms with our true selves.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults," said Pascal, "but it is a still greater evil to be full of them, and to be unwilling to recognize them.

In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts laments the loss of "deep reading," which requires intense concentration, a conscious lowering of the gates of perception, and a slower pace.

Like all great readers, he could create for himself a wall of stillness.

Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.

Some of us are born to a solitary life.