Quotes About Introspection

Knowing that you do not know is to ask humbly, instead of tell arrogantly. That is the beginning of wisdom.

She stood silent among the quiet sounds of the night, and certainty came to her.

how it is that men, even thoughtful men, can sound as if they never consider anything but always simply know.

I knew that I was smiling her smile, that she was a dark mirror to me.

When she looked down the hall at Anne and at me it was as if she looked straight through us, as if we were nothing but clear panes of Venetian glass and all she wanted to know was what might be beyond. She did not seem to envy us, nor see us as rivals to her father's attention or even as a danger to her mother's place. She saw us as a pair of light women, so insubstantial that the wind might blow us away in a merciful puff. She

I had a small looking glass on the wall and I stood before it and gazed at my own reflection.

What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others," the psychoanalyst

À toutes mes haines acidulées, vous avez donné le narcotique raisonnable.

There are things we see with our eyes, sitting high and looking out. And there are things we see with our hearts, sitting still and looking in.

It takes a certain amount of courage, he though, to face yourself and say with candor, I'm rotten. I've done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.

At this very moment, you may be saying to yourself that you have any number of admirable qualities. You are a loyal friend, a caring person, someone who is smart, dependable, fun to be around. That's wonderful, and I'm happy for you, but let me ask you this: are you being any of those things to yourself?

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn't about turning your back on the world; it's about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply. •

Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere. Our creations come not when we're out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we're sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences. Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art. Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.

Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?

C'est encore à partir du centre et non de l'extérieur que je peux ordonner. Si je ne fais que me conformer à une idée, aussi sublime soit-elle, cela signifie que quelque part existe la violence qui en est le corollaire, car se conformer n'implique-t-il pas déformer ? (p.250)

I do not think, I note (Je ne pense pas; je note)

One looks for some other words but the ideas are always just as dark, just as simple and singularly painful.

It is the man who can't be trusted who does not trust others because he judges them by himself.

Speeches of self-justification were seldom worthwhile for any but the speaker.

Become what you are, having learned what that is.

I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.

Man is a being in search of meaning.