Quotes About Introspection

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.

First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

Christopher Hitchens once said that he drinks "because it makes other people less boring.

And so we create a story—a "drama about me"—that may gradually wander far away from the here and now and far away from the way things actually are. Once the script we have concocted for ourselves has been set in the mind, we may unwittingly rely on it as a reference point for all present and future judgments—without ever checking back with the here and now. Without knowing it, our thoughts become words carved in stone rather than words written on water.

use your restless and churning mind as an opportunity to look more deeply into it, rather than as an immediate reason to conclude that the meditation is "not working.

The mind seems to have a mind of its own.

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

Before we can conquer the world, we must first conquer the self.

In all that surrounds him the egotist sees only the frame of his own portrait.

Ian sat and listened in the studio, headphones around his neck, staring at the floor. That was his heart they'd just heard.

Poets, philosophers and seers have always concerned themselves with the idea of a true self, and the betrayal of the self has been a typical example of the unacceptable.

I'd bite myself and take out my feelings with my teeth.

So far as I could tell, I was alone here, at least in this section. I wasn't happy about the way the corridor went up a little ways and disappeared around a bend. I decided then and there if I ever try to be an architect, all my buildings would borrow from my old high school gymnasium—a big, empty space where you can't possible hide anything. May not be much in the way of privacy, but there are advantages all right.

The longest journeyIs the journey inwardsOf him who has chosen his destiny.

The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.

The longest journey is the journey inward.

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of its simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

Genuine happiness can only be achieved when we transform our way of life from the unthinking pursuit of pleasure to one committed to enriching our inner lives, when we focus on 'being more' rather than simply having more.

From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it.

Surely the world we live in is but the world that lives in us.