Quotes About Introspection

The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us … that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known.

notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres.

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

He sat there silent, watching their love expire.

En cuanto somos desdichados, nos volvemos morales.

we ought not to attach ourselves to beings, it is not beings who exist in reality and are amenable to description, but ideas.

With intelligent people, three-quarters of the things they suffer from come from their intelligence.

A w ko?cu, je?li chwile wytchnienia lub dystrakcji towarzyskich oka?? mi si? konieczne, czu?em, ?e bardziej od rozmów intelektualnych, które ludzie ?wiatowi uwa?aj? za po?yteczne dla pisarza, mi?ostki z zakwitaj?cymi dziewcz?tami b?d? moim pokarmem wybranym, któremu ostatecznie dam przyst?p do mojej wyobra?ni, przypominaj?cej owego s?ynnego konia karmionego tylko ró?ami.

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.

Only that issues from ourselves which we ourselves extract from the darkness within ourselves and which is unknown to others.

so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.

In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overruled every other feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the admiration of his hall-porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman whom he hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.

something which had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.

inebriation brings about for an hour or two a state of subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; everything is reduced to appearances and exists only as a function of our sublime self.

With the girls, on the other hand, if the pleasure which I enjoyed was selfish, at least it was not based on the lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone and prevents us from admitting that, when we chat, it is no longer we who speak, that we are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people and not of a self that differs from them.

I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them.

One can seldom admire what one loves.

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

La tristesse des hommes qui ont vieilli c'est de ne pas même songer à écrire de telles lettres dont ils ont appris l'inefficacité.

it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.

that form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves...