Quotes About Introspection

He who knows himself is wise; yet have we no sooner acquired real consciousness of our being than we learn that true wisdom is a thing that lies far deeper than consciousness. The chief gain of increased consciousness is that it unveils an ever-loftier unconsciousness, on whose heights do the sources lie of the purest wisdom.

Our real life is not the life we live, and we feel that our deepest, nay, our most intimate thoughts are quite apart from ourselves, for we are other than our thoughts and our dreams. And it is only at special moments – it may be by merest accident – that we live our own life. Will the day ever dawn when we shall be what we are? …

We subdue that in others which we have learned to subdue in ourselves. Around the upright man there is drawn a wide circle of peace, within which the arrows of evil soon cease to fall; nor have his fellows the power to inflict moral suffering upon him.

We suffer but little from suffering itself; but from the manner wherein we accept it overwhelming sorrow may spring. We are wrong in believing that it comes from without. For indeed we create it within us, out of our very substance.

As gold and silver are weighed in pure water, so does the soul test its weight in silence, and the words that we let fall have no meaning apart from the silence that wraps them round.

Expression is like a step taken in the fog--no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead.

If I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensation includes a seed of dream or depersonalization, as we experience through this sort of stupor into which it puts us when we truly live at the level of sensation.

Philosophy is not a hospital. If people are vertiginous and want to take medication against it, I don't stop them, but I say: this is medication.

If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that 'one' perceives in me, and not that I perceive.

I rediscover the world - which I had distinguished from myself as a sum of things or of processes tied together through causal relations - 'in myself' as the permanent horizon of all of my thoughts and as a dimension in relation to which I never cease situating myself.

The relation to the world, such as it tirelessly announces itself within us, is not something that analysis might clarify: philosophy can simply place it before our eyes and invite us to take notice.

True philosophy entails relearning to see the world anew.

All writers who are unprejudiced and open to the future know what they do not want better than what they do want.

Psychological reflection, however, obliges us to place the precise world back into its cradle of consciousness, to ask ourselves how the very idea of the precise world or of precise truth is possible, and to seek out its first springing forth into consciousness. (...) Consciousness must be brought face to face with its unreflective life in things and must awaken to its own, forgotten, history - this is the true role of philosophical reflection.

There is equal weakness in blaming ourselves alone and in believing only in external causes. In one way or another we will always miss the mark if we do. Evil is not created by us or by others; it is born in this web that we have spun about us—and that is suffocating us. What sufficiently tough new men will be patient enough to really reweave it?

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

Existence turning back upon itself but without succeeding in carrying itself away.

We perceive others as reflections and at the same time as lacunae in relation to ourselves. In effect, it is like a forbidden zone...With others, it will always be impossible to perceive them in their totalities--that is, to perceive them as they perceive themselves.

What is at issue is to recognize the operation in us which is us and which is not ours.

Writers don't have the impression that they are creating or inventing because they are, in effect, in the process of deciphering the hieroglyphics of their landscape.

I can never say 'I' absolutely.

When I am seated at my table, I can instantly 'visualize' the parts of my body that it conceals from me. As I clench my foot inside my shoe, I can see it. I have this power even for parts of my body that I have never seen.

It is true that we discover the unreflected. But the unreflected we go back to is not that which is prior to philosophy or prior to reflection. It is the unreflected which is understood and conquered by reflection.

It is absolutely necessary to go back, to return to Freud.