Quotes About Introspection

There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.

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 which is nourished only in betrayals and hatred.

He does not care if people fail to understand what he did in the woods. He didn't do it for us to understand.

Time amid the silence of nature, in other words, makes you smarter.

People are to be taken in very small doses," wrote Emerson. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

The solitary is necessarily a man who does what he wants to do," wrote Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who died in 1968. "In fact, he has nothing else to do. That is why his vocation is both dangerous and despised.

I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode,

reaching through time and speaking directly to him: Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground. "I recognize myself

Carl Jung said that only an introvert could see "the unfathomable stupidity of man." Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "Wherever is the crowd is a common denominator of stench." Knight's best friend, Thoreau, believed that all societies, no matter how well intentioned, pervert their citizens. Sartre wrote, "Hell is other people.

I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.

Proust laat ook zien dat er geen betere manier om anderen te misleiden bestaat dan eerst jezelf te misleiden: 'Men liegt het hele leven door, met name tegen geliefden, en bovenal tegen de vreemdeling wiens minachting ons de meeste pijn zou doen: zichzelf.

?nsan ba?kalar?n?n kusurlar?n? yabayla saman savururcas?na kolay aç??a ç?kar?r ama kendininkileri kurnaz bir kumarbaz?n zar?n? tutu?undaki ustal?kla saklar." - Buda

?nsanlar?n kötülükleri ya?ar tunçta, yazar?z erdemlerini suya." - Shakespeare

We know nothing worth knowing about what goes on outside our frontiers. Worse-we know very little more about what goes on within them. Beyond the light of one's own personal experience-darkness. What are people thinking? What are they feeling? How do they behave? Messages of reassurance or exhortation come through. One reads between the lines. Friends pool their knowledge. But in general we live like animals, in ignorance of the world around us.

Margrethe slips into history even as I turn back to Bohr. And yet how much more difficult still it is to catch the slightest glimpse of what's behind one's eyes. Here I am at the centre of the universe, and yet all I can see are two smiles that don't belong to me.

The Man With Two Faces

When Nouri said that he wanted to be with God, Ibn Arwani said: "First you must learn who 'you' are. Then you must learn what it means to 'want.' What it means to 'be.' Then you must learn what 'God' is. Otherwise, it's just a game. A pretense.

If I have a style, I am not aware of it.

Boys need to learn the value of spiritual solitude. For the soul to grow, it needs those moments of no-stimulation, of wakeful peace. Because we adults don't usually practice enough solitude—because we are always 'doing' things—we often neglect to teach our boys to find solitude

I man is a prisoner of only his own mind.

Before they can know what they need, they need to know who they are. This is one of Belichick's core philosophies, and it is why he was sitting in this Gillette Stadium room with a binder, notebook, pens, and pages of football statistics.

You know you're getting old when you stoop to tie your shoes and wonder what else you can do when you're down there."? – George Burns

When I visit the past now, it is for wisdom and experience, not for regret or shame.

This is what my lifelong search for room to maneuver had come to: a box of water in a lightless, windowless nine-by-sixteen-foot room—afraid to leave my artificial womb, to go outside where I could only cause trouble, disappoint my family and myself. Best, I thought, to stay right here where I couldn't fuck anything up. And stay I would, day after day, sometimes three or four times on weekends, for hours at a time, just trying to keep my head below water. Connecticut—Christmas