Quotes About Introspection

I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in the present. I was awash in an accumulation of past feelings and future dreads, all similar, at least as far as my brain was concerned, and so, lumped together as one. But nobody can handle a lifetime of experience in one moment. That's why depression crushes you.

Adeline, who is the girl that she once was, the bright Victorian girl shut behind dark paneled doors with her thirteen, fifteen, eighteen years of life and a Greek lexicon. She is the girl stopped in time who could not speak or feel at the side of her dead mother's bed. She keeps the cold, clear information of those days, unclouded by revision or the lies of age.

I was boring myself. That's the worst part of a bad date. It makes you feel like a toad, and you keep telling yourself, "I know I'm more fun than this, and I know that when I came into this café I wasn't in despair about the human condition.

We all love to discover for ourselves the causes of problems.  When we do discover for ourselves our energy really moves inside us.  When we are told the answers we might learn a little, but it is nothing like the magic of discovering things through our own questions.

He felt like a satrap amid all those acres of sheets. But this morning it was different. He was simply lying there and adding up the future like a sum; and whichever way he added it, it came out wrong.

The eternal quest of the human being is to shatter his loneliness.

We in America have everything we need except the most important thing of all-time to think and the habit of thought.

The way a book is read- which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book- can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.

Men seek retreats for themselves in country places, on beaches and mountains, and you yourself are wont to long for such retreats, but that is altogether unenlightened when it is possible at any hour you please to find a retreat within yourself. For nowhere can a man withdraw to a more untroubled quietude than in his own soul.12

Men seek retreats for themselves in country places, on beaches and mountains, and you yourself are wont to long for such retreats, but that is altogether unenlightened when it is possible at any hour you please to find a retreat within yourself. For nowhere can a man withdraw to a more untroubled quietude than in his own soul.

Trust your own eyes. Only you can determine what is happening in your life and what to do about it. The

The human mind is a swirl of activity mostly centered around self preservation and self justification.

Augustine was right when he said that we love the truth when it enlightens us, but we hate it when it convicts us.

Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living.

But because I do not wish to be remembered (if I will be remembered) as a self-indulgent fantasist, I'll skip the purple patch for now, however much I wish to write it. I need to make amends for my indifference, for having turned my back on the world in favor of the beauties of the way. I'll try to study cruelty (I regret my own) and render it in more familiar terms.

He knocked absurdly on the skull like a man impatient for a door to open. His eyes glazed over. He appeared to be in the grasp of something beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. 'Time is slowing,' he said in a leaden voice. 'Each moment grows and fattens like a drop of rain on a window sash, waiting to fall.

Even now, when I have time to consider what I've been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor of a man, for all the difference I've made on earth.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.

One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart