Quotes About Introspection

use questions to raise questions

We live in an age in which the overwhelming majority of people appear to be comfortable with their myopia.

Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians," W. H. Auden said in a sermon, "will do well to be extremely reticent on the subject. Indeed it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn't one, either in faith or morals.

For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it? - I don't know.

After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.

I have no desire for others to take it on themselves to analyze my thoughts. I am without thoughts. I have never, not even once, acted on the basis of any doctrine or philosophy.I am convinced that those people whom the world considers good and respects are all liars and fakes. I do not trust the world.

I also have the impression that many women have been able, instinctively, to sniff out this loneliness of mine, which I confided to no one, and this in later years was to become one of the causes of my being taken advantage of.

From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?

What uneasiness lies in being loved.

God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?

No. You won't do. You've treated me nicely, yes, but only because you find me curious and amusing. It made me feel so lonely, somehow... I'm really just a foolish and useless person.

Show me what you've written," I said, although I wanted desperately to avoid looking at it.

Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don't know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.

Whenever I let the slightest thing make me forget myself, I can't help but be disappointed

I am congenitally unable to take much interest in other people,

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is the individual.

I'm going somewhere where there aren't any women.

You've treated me nicely, yes, but only because you find me curious and amusing. It's made me feel so lonely, somehow.

I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

Nevertheless, I still wait for someone. Who on earth am I waiting for, sitting here everyday? For what sort of person? Maybe what I'm waiting for isn't even a human. I dislike humans. No, I fear them. When I meet someone and indifferently exchange such greetings as 'How are you?' or 'It's become cold', greetings I don't want to make, I somehow get the unpleasant feeling that there is no such horrible liar in the whole world as I, and I wish I were dead.

no thought in the world is worse than the realization that, "My life is a nuisance to others. I am useless.

This year I am twenty-seven. My hair has become much greyer. Most people would take me for over forty.