Quotes About Introspection

You shape yourself, you make yourself. There is no one to save you other than yourself. It's not Christ, Mohammed or Moses who's responsible for your life, it's you. In the end, souls judge themselves.

Carl Jung said that only an introvert could see "the unfathomable stupidity of man

That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable." Later he added, "I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.

I'm not used to seeing people's faces. There's too much information there. Aren't you aware of it? Too much, too fast.

Solitude increased my perception. But here's the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant. (I)solation felt more like communion...To put it romantically, I was completely free.

The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of human interactions was so complex.

If you like solitude, you're never alone.

He marveled at the poetry of Emily Dickinson, sensing her kindred spirit. For the last seventeen years of her life, Dickinson rarely left her home in Massachusetts and spoke to visitors only through a partially closed door. "Saying nothing, " she wrote, "sometimes says the most.

Still, the ten days were enough for me to see, as if peering over the edge of a well, that silence could be mystical, and that if you dared, diving fully into your inner depths might be both profound and disturbing.

There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,' Knight said.

Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, largely withdrew from public life for thirty years. "All profound things," he wrote, "are preceded and attended by Silence.

People are to be taken in very small doses," wrote Emerson. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself." Knight read the Tao Te Ching and felt a deep-rooted connection to the verses. "Good walking," says the Tao, "leaves no tracks.

Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can't dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here's the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.

He sat quietly, whether thinking or fuming or both, it was hard to tell. But he eventually arrived at a reply. It felt like some great mystic was about to reveal the Meaning of Life. "Get enough sleep," he said. He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn't be saying any more. This was what he'd learned. I accepted it as truth.

the true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself.

Knight, still furious about the image thirty years later, was a man acutely attuned to the ravages of shame. Had he done something shameful before he'd fled to the forest? He insisted that he had not.

The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can't dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here's

Knight felt his chest clench with melancholy. How had his life come to this? He occasionally missed his family. 'I suppose a more subtle answer would be, I missed some of my family to a certain degree,' he allowed.

These hermits often wonder how the rest of the world can be so blind, not to notice what we're doing to ourselves. "I have become solitary," wrote the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "because to me the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men

The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of actual human interactions was so complex.

I like being alone. My preferred exercise is solo long-distance running, and my job, as a journalist and writer, is often asocial. When life becomes overwhelming, my first thought—my fantasy—is to head for the woods.

I think that most of us feel like something is missing from our lives, and I wondered then if Knight's journey was to seek it. But life isn't about searching endlessly to find what's missing; it's about learning to live with the missing parts

Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is