Quotes About Introspection

The truth is, you see, however much they would beg to disagree humans don't actually like to win. Or rather, they like winning for ten seconds, but if they keep on winning, they end up actually having to think about other things, like life and death. The only thing humans like less than winning is losing, but at least something can be done about that. With absolute winning, there is nothing to be done. They just have to deal with it.

I don't know why people say sorry when they havent done the thing they are saying sorry for. It is like everyone in the world is a little bit to blame for everything.

Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself. I am trying.

You need to be uncomfortable. You need to hurt. As the Persian poet Rumi wrote in the twelfth century, "The wound is the place where the light enters you.

She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano, she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.

The way out is never through yourself.

Or maybe, just maybe, he'd got close enough to sense the melancholy that sits at the core of her, usually hidden deep behind a superficial mask of cheerful sarcasm.

I suppose, in the absence of universal certainties, we are our own best laboratory.

To believe in the things we feel at that point is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.

When she thought about it – and increasingly she had been thinking about it – Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn't. The things she hadn't been able to become. And there really were quite a lot of things she hadn't become.

As she stared now at the magazine cover - an image of a black hole - she realised that's what she was. A black hole. A dying start collapsing in on itself.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. "Is there no way out of the mind?" Sylvia Plath famously asked.

Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.

But she'd been feeling lonely. And though she'd studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe, it was good to see him.

Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.

She was antimatter, with added self-pity.

If your life isn't working You have to ask why.

You are right to think of these lives like a piano where you're playing tunes that aren't really you. You are forgetting who you are. In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one. You are forgetting your root life. You are forgetting what worked for you and what didn't. You are forgetting your regrets.

She had a fire insider her. She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her. The she realised. A fire has no motive. Only she could have that. The power was hers.

meet with a success unexpected in common hours.' He'd also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. 'I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself.

Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes.

I was better. I was better. But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realized I wasn't perfectly well was the moment I realized I was still very ill indeed.

She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.