Quotes About Introspection

I have spent considerable of my leisure time in this past year in the improvement of my mind but I find that much of it has been spent extremely foolish and that walking in the pasture at dusk with virtuous, amiable and genteel young ladies I experience none but swineish passions. I commenced to read Russell's Modern Europe sometime last summer.

I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.

The landings were dirty and the walls were bare. This stairway brought me into the balcony, and I sat there in the dark, thinking that nothing now was going to save me, that no pretty girl with new shoes was going to cross my path in time.

we obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us.

As I approach my fortieth birthday without having accomplished any one of the things I intended to accomplish—without ever having achieved the deep creativity that I have worked toward for all this time—I feel that I take a minor, an obscure, a dim position that is not my destiny but that is my fault, as if I had lacked, somewhere along the line, the wit and courage to contain myself competently within the shapes at hand.

And walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have completely escaped. It is the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people's contentment and vitality. It seems comical -- farcical -- that, having been treated so generously, I should be struck with this image of a kid in the rain walking along the road shoulders of East Milton.

The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be.

since these are hours and days out of one's life, can there be any other course but to look back into them, even though at times they seem like waste?

Lo que sentía por Eduardo era más parecido a la nostalgia que al espíritu aventurero del amor tradicional, pero no era un sentimiento menos fuerte. Comprendió que, si verdaderamente buscaba la pureza, nunca la encontraría en sí mismo.

The trouble is that most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they're right

Even now, I am anxious about the naked thoughts that I have shared. The observations are blisteringly honest and of course they have to be.

Suddenly, with a cynical frankness, he began comparing his feelings for these two girls. 'The truth is,' he said to himself, 'I love them both! I love Gerda because she's so simple, and because I've slept with her all these months ; and I love Christie because she's so subtle, and because I've never slept with her!

It's as if we were both digging into each other's soul to find a self that was put there before we were born.

Being a philosopher, rather than a neophyte in sanctity, Mr. Gaul did not feel it at all incumbent upon him to refrain from contemplating Perdita's legs.

There was something about the man's abject humility that excited him in a way he could not have explained.

Wolf took off his hat and stretched back his head, straining his neck as far as it would go, so that without relaxing the movement of walking, his upturned face might become horizontal. In this position he made a hideous grimace into infinity – a grimace directed at the Governing Power of the Universe. What

All inventions,' he thought, 'come from man's brains. And man's soul can escape from them, and even while using them, treat them with contempt – treat them as if they were not! It

Wolf Solent was able to indulge in such an orgy of concentrated thought, that these three or four hours lengthened themselves out into something beyond all human measurement.

I am convinced that we have to go through difficult, heartbreaking and emotional times to better understand who we are..from the inside out.

I fall too fast, too hard, and it always ends up hurting me.

It's funny how you can tell someone likes someone else, but you can't tell when someone likes you.

He's just a boy who doesn't understand what's in front of him. She's just a girl who doesn't know how to let go.

I'm already hating myself at a single-on-Valentine's-Day level.

Just remember that being alone on Valentine's Day is no different than any other day of your life.