Quotes About Introspection

The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.

living life in a pragmatic, utilitarian manner turns you into a utilitarian pragmatist. The "How do I succeed?" questions quickly eclipse the "Why am I doing this?" questions.

familiar process before they can acknowledge how comprehensive their problem is. First, they deny that there's something wrong with their life. Then they intensify their efforts to follow the old failing plan. Then they try to treat themselves with some new thrill: They have an affair, drink more, or start doing drugs. Only when all this fails do they admit that they need to change the way they think about life.

William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

People in the valley have been broken open. They have been reminded that they are not just the parts of themselves that they put on display.

trying to mold one's life around the heroic and deep souls one found in books. Day read as if her whole life depended upon it.

The first big thing suffering does is it drags you deeper into yourself.

People who endure suffering are taken beneath the routine busyness of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be.

Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness.

Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them or what we are here for.

The people who are made larger by suffering go on to stage two small rebellions. First, they rebel against their ego ideal. .. down in the valley, they lose interest in their ego ideal

Sin is a necessary piece of our mental furniture because it reminds us that life is a moral affair.

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.

People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists. Moral realists are aware that we are all built from "crooked timber"— from Immanuel Kant's famous line, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

Maybe I was drinking and drugging more than I should have done. Well, in fact, I know I was for Black Tie White Noise and Let's Dance.

Christmas gives us the opportunity to pause and reflect on the important things around us - a time when we can look back on the year that has passed and prepare for the year ahead.

Everyone is told just as much as he needs to know, including the self.

I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it; indeed, especially when one doesn't like it.

How we view ourselves and define ourselves is perhaps the most essential paradigm we have as human beings. It determines all of our actions and reactions.

If you want to change yourself long term, you have to change the way you think and change the way you perceive the world. You have to come up with a new set of eyes to view yourself with. You need a new way of communicating internally with yourself and you need to ask yourself different questions.

know that nothing anyone ever does to you can be as terrible as what you do yourself. Remember that.

Loneliness is the price you pay for keeping things uncomplicated

When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.

As an artist you look into yourself to understand the human potential to be all kinds of things that are not necessarily pleasant but are real - a criminal, a murderer, a sadist, a rapist; to be all of these things that many people are. You can't allow yourself to say, 'I'm a different species from those people.' Because you aren't.