Quotes About Introspection

We erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves - idealised, you know, but still recognisable - and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness.

I am not all sneers and scathings, you see, I have my gentler side.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

There is in me, deep down, as there must be in everyone–at least, I hope there is, for I would not wish to be alone in this–a part that does not care for anything other than itself. I could lose everything and everyone and that pilot light would still be burning at my centre, that steady flame that nothing will quench, until the final quenching.

This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded.

There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I'm startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.

I am old now, or oldening ...

The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.

What is my purpose here? I may say, I just sat down to write, but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself.

What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper.

In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.

In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt?

Tendo a non fare molto caso alle altre persone – l'ho già detto in precedenza, è uno dei miei difetti più gravi – e nelle rare occasioni in cui metto la testa fuori dal guscio e do una bella occhiata, quello che mi colpisce in modo strabiliante non è quanto siano diversi da me, ma quanto siano simili, malgrado tutto.

The world's first task, as I knew well, a task it never relaxed from, was to undo me. I was even afraid of the sky.

The glimmering landscape materialized slowly before him. Such stillness. He might have been the last man in the world.

But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse. I

I had a sudden image of myself as a sort of large dark simian something slumped there at the table, or not a something but a nothing, rather, a hole in the room, a palpable absence, a darkness visible.

He had a habit also, when being spoken to, no matter how earnestly, of turning very slowly on his heel and limping a little way away, head bowed, and then stopping to stand with his back turned and hands clasped behind him, so that one could not be sure that he was still listening to what one was saying, or had sunk into altogether more profound communings with himself.

Å»aden szczegóÅ' ludzkiego oblicza nie zniesie dÅ'u?szej obserwacji.

I was estranged from myself and all that I had once supposed I was. My life up to now had only the weightless density of a dream. When I thought about my past it was like thinking of what someone else had been, someone I had never met but whose history I knew by heart. It all seemed no more than a vivid fiction.

We have had quite a time of it, quite a time. I move, when I move, in a daze of bafflement. It's as if I had been standing for all my life in front of a full-length mirror, watching the people passing by, behind and in front of me, and now someone had taken me roughly by the shoulders and spun me about, and behold! There it was, the unreflected world, of people and things, and I nowhere to be seen in it. I might as well have been the one who died.

the enemy you flee is not exterior to yourself

Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don't think. . . I know what I'm talking about.

That clever folk care less for what ye think than why ye think it.