Quotes About Introspection

Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens.

One can enjoy a wood fire worthily only when he warms his thoughts by it as well as his hands and feet.

When I am alone, I love the wide roads. There, I have conversations with myself. My free steps move easily and my body leaves my spirit free of obstacles; it discourses, it reasons, it presses me with questions.

Middle age is when you are sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it is not for you.

Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.

Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.

Do you think my mind is maturing late, or simply rotted early?

Whether or not you go in a positive direction depends entirely on you. You have to be your own teacher and try to figure out what it takes to accomplish your goals. You have to be your own judge and try to get yourself to do the right thing and stop yourself from doing the wrong thing. Take responsibility for yourself. (17th Karmapa)

Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new sweet earth and the Great Silence alone.

The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! he will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup.

But, after all, we see only our own image in the universe-- our particular idiosyncrasies dictate the mode of our perceptions.

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.

Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.

he tried hard to analyse his feelings about the human species, and the causes of his own fluctuation between adoration and contemptuous resentment

It is much harder to forgive yourself than it is to forgive others. You will not master the act of forgiveness until you start with yourself.

That is why fiction existed, as a way to look at the world without being broken by it.

He was drunk, but this was something he'd thought about for a long time and needed no sobriety to express—just a listener.

Or maybe her smile has nothing to do with me, and I'm not really the center of the universe. Unlikely, but possible.

It had been a five-year exercise in self-immolation.

Pacing from room to room and in each window a different version of a framed woman unable to rest, set against a sky full of beating wings and abandoned directions. Her five chambered heart filling with the panic of birds, asking: What? What if not this?

The best conversations are with yourself. At least there's no risk of a misunderstanding.

Speaking does harm, sows confusion and weakens things that are obvious. Speaking makes me tremble inside. I don't think I have ever said anything really important in my entire life -- there's a lack of words for the most important things anyway. (I must make a list of missing words -- top of it I'll put a verb that means something in between "I sense" and "I see.")

She's a loner, she doesn't care about being around people. So neither failure nor success concerns her.

perhaps solitude has stretched out his thoughts into long strands, and accustomed him to internal dialogues.