Quotes About Introspection

The ears are better listeners than the tongue.

The most difficult person to hide from is yourself.

You learn more from your tears than your smiles.

Your highest self is revealed in your lowest moments.

Your inner voice whispers, but speaks the loudest.

The fact that Saigyo composed a poem that begins, "I shall be unhappy without loneliness," shows that he made loneliness his master.

At one time I was weary of verse writing, and wanted to give it up. At another time I was determined to be a poet until I could establish a proud name over others. The alternatives battled in my mind and made my life restless.

Should I hold it in my hand, it will melt in my burning tears. Autumnal frost.

Autumn eve – please turn to me. I, too, am stranger.

The master said, 'Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk.' What he meant was that the poet should detach his mind from self… and enter into the object, sharing its delicate life and its feelings. Whereupon a poem forms itself. Description of the object is not enough: unless a poem contains feelings which have come from the object, the object and the poet's self will be separate things.

Weather-beaten heart the wind must blow right through my body

First rain of winter today's a day people get older

Loneliness - caged cricket dangling from the wall.

Suvvia, andiamo a contemplare la neve fino a cadervi dentro.

aphorism 90: I am incorrigible. I would have every object of the universe mechanically predictable but myself.

aphorism 129: I would have every thought stoop and touch the Earth but that I already know the impossibility of the effort. A thought seems to have a life of its own and would rather leave itself open to flattering interpretations.

Public speaking creates a mirror in which you see in the audience an amplified version of what is going on inside of you.

If all knowledge is self knowledge, you don't know shit.

There's a point at 7,000 RPM... where everything fades. The machine becomes weightless. Just disappears. And all that's left is a body moving through space and time. 7,000 RPM. That's where you meet it. You feel it coming. It creeps up on you, close in your ear. Asks you a question. The only question that matters. Who are you?

Uno nods, looks out over his high school football field again. He knows deep down he would never kill himself. He likes being alive. Even if he knows the things that happen to him aren't always good. It doesn't matter. He wants to be alive. And not only that, he wants to see who he is. Like somebody from the outside can.

That's the weirdest thing, by the way. That every person you come across lays down in a bed, under the covers, and closes their eyes at night. Cops, teachers, parents, hot girls, pro ballers, everybody. For some reason it makes people seem so much less real when I look at them.

My stain will never get fixed 'cause it's on the inside. And lasers can't reach there.

And a thought occurs to him: Maybe you can't really know anyone just by looking at their face.

There are two kinds of people in this world, young fella. Those who can sit in the loneliness of existence and those who turn away.