Quotes About Introspection

My great fear in this life didn't have a name that I knew of. I was afraid of remaining exactly who I was, and that phobia instilled a shiver of fear into every one of my days. Something as simple as a fear of cats would have been a blessing.

Just then things weren't going so well in my life. My business was precariously perched on the brink of bankruptcy, my anemic love life was the stuff of a Sartre treatise – Being with Nothingness – my car could use a tune-up, my apartment could use a scrubbing, my body could use some exercise, though who would give it that was a mystery to me. I was too young to feel old, and yet there it was, the despair of middle age, hanging around my neck like a noose.

Sometimes you only saw yourself clearly in the eyes of those you've left, and what you saw was a horror.

Everyone has something to teach you, Duddleman, if you can bear to stay quiet enough to listen.

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.

William Makepeace Thackeray

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.

What you say about me, you're really saying about yourself.

I don't believe environment had much to do with it. It must be something deeper than that. She sighed, raised her head, and looked at Mrs. Breedlove once more, thinking: It was something dark. Something dark and unexplainable.

There was somebody screaming somewhere, and she kept wondering who it could be. She turned to the people who watched her and said in a lost, chiding voice, "Quit screaming, please! Screaming doesn't help!" She closed her eyes and leaned against the fence; and then she knew the person screaming was herself.

Dick and Tot walked down the lane together, deep in a conversation of silence.

Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else

I don't like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is.

Gin and catatonic?

I secretly worship God," Hunter wrote near the end of his life. "He had the good judgment to leave me alone to write a few genuine black-on-white pages by myself.

Hunter Thompson wrote suicide notes all his life.

I am aware that I am aware

Start admiring the vastness of the forest and a tree will surely fall on you, bashing your skull for the crime of perspective.

Her mother had once told her that one could run away from home, from husband, from children, from trouble, but it was impossible to run away from oneself. "You always have to take yourself with you," she said. And now, bending towards her mother, Hope wondered if in death you were finally able to run away from yourself. This might be death's gift. She knew that the thought wasn't terribly profound, but she was moved by the notion of completion and of escape.

Because they're free. -They might look free, but they aren't. Believe me. You're free. -How am I free? -You're free to be modest. You're free to not smoke up. You're free to be here and listen and not respond to the nonsense that Hanna spouts. You're very calm, and you're very comfortable with yourself.

You can not lie in your paintings, because you cannot hide from yourself.

Saw so much of the wickedness of my heart that I longed to get away from myself…I felt almost pressed to death with my own vileness. Oh what a body of death is there in me…Oh the closest walk with God is the sweetest heaven that can be enjoyed on earth!

The stresses of high-altitude climbing reveal your true character; they unmask who you really are. You no longer have all the social graces to hide behind, to play roles. You are the essence of what you are.

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?