Quotes About Introspection

If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible.

in the state of mind in which we "observe" we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create. There was, then, embedded in my

I was left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and violets, which, like people who are kept waiting in a room beside you but do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more impressive, and received coldly the warmth of a glowing fire of coals, preciously displayed behind a screen of crystal, in a basin of white marble over which it spilled, now and again, its perilous rubies.

La lectura está en el umbral de la vida espiritual; puede introducirnos en ella: no la constituye.

The truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me

Even his mother, his own mother, had once accused him of being a snob.

He felt the inspirations of his youth, which had been dissipated by a frivolous life, stirring again in him, but they all bore now the reflection, the stamp of a particular being; and during the long hours which he now found a subtle pleasure in spending at home, alone with his convalescent soul, he became gradually himself again, but himself in thraldom to another. He

In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen. And

For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them.

He beguiled me almost by surprise into doing wrong, then he got me accustomed to having bad thoughts which I had no will to resist—willpower being the only force capable of driving them back to the infernal darkness from which they emerged.

Cada lector es, cuando lee, el propio lector de sí mismo. La obra del escritor no es más que una especie de instrumento óptico ofrecido al lector para permitirle discernir lo que, sin ese libro, no hubiera podido ver en sí mismo.

they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.

Os que vêm a conhecer algum detalhe exato da vida alheia tiram logo consequências que não o são, e veem no fato recém-descoberto a explicação de coisas que precisamente não têm nenhuma relação com ele.

We try to rediscover in things, now precious because of it, the glimmer that our soul projected on them; we are disappointed to find that they seem to lack in nature the charm they derived in our thoughts from the proximity of certain ideas; at times we convert all the forces of that soul into cunning, into magnificence, in order to have an effect on people who are outside us, as we are well aware, and whom we will never reach

The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think - and to feel - such melancholy things.

Because of the infinite quality of love, or its egotism, the intellectual and spiritual physiognomy of the people we love are the least objectively defined for us. We are constantly retouching them to suit our desires and our fears; we do not separate them from us; they are but an immense and vague place where our affections exteriorize themselves.

Benim insanlar?n zekas?yla ilgili dü?üncem bazen de?i?ir;ama de?i?menin onlar?n zekas? de?il, benim dü?üncem oldu?unu gayet iyi bilirim.

Swann's father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts. Several

It was in the defects that they [servants] invariably acquired that I learned of my own natural, invariable defects, and their character presented me with a sort of negative proof of my own.

Je moi-même semblait en fait à avoir devenir la sujet de ma livre: un église, un quatuor, et la amitié entre François I and Charles V.

felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;

She lived her life, but I may have been the only one to dream it.

So that every fresh encounter is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we really did see. We have no longer any recollection of this, to such an extent does what we call remembering a person consist really in forgetting him.