Quotes About Introspection

I've just spent three hours learning the entire life of some girl named Kallie, a girl with an epileptic tongue who loves booze, Coldplay, and a gym-addicted frat boy named Wes. Okay, so maybe Francesca has a point. Maybe it's time to quit the Internet.

when you step out of your box you gain a deeper understanding of yourself!

Joséphine avait peur, si peur. Elle aurait pu indiquer précisément où elle avait peur, mesurer la longueur, l'épaisseur, le diamètre de la barre qui lui écrasait le plexus et l'empêchait de respirer.

Unlike his compatriots - many of whom were still, in their mid-twenties, adolescent posturers, doomed to futility - he had an engaging earnestness about him. Unlike them, he realized his incompleteness as a person and strove to overcome that. One of the ways in which he did that was by reading. He didn't read much, or too widely, but attentively, looking for instruction, hints for self-improvement, and he read serious books.

Brought up into a life with little meaning, we had convinced ourselves that meaningful ways of being existed, and we would find them. In reality, this amounted to running this way and that, uncertain of our destination, and looking back enquiringly all the time.

The second, first thought.

The creative hopeless.

When, while, while when you walk.

Il viaggio immobile è il più difficile di tutti, perché non hai scampo, sei solo con te stesso, in preda alle visioni, e lasciarsi andare è facile, quasi naturale.

Perché sono venuto qui? Me lo chiedo a ogni partenza, come se fosse stato l'ordine supremo di uno zar, e non la mia personale volontà, a spingermi lontano.

Since you alone are responsible for your thoughts, only you can change them.

Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don't know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.

I try not to think about how easily I slipped through a crack in the floor. It's like, if you were walking down the street with your friends, and suddenly one of them slipped down an open manhole, you'd notice, wouldn't you? I certainly would! I mean . . . I think I would. I hope I would. Or maybe we're all so focused straight ahead, people slip away when we're not looking.

How things look on the outside of us depends on how things are on the inside of us.

You go through it like a dark room, you sweat, you fear, the fear passes, you come out of it and utter nothing but meaningless words about what you saw or felt.

She never thought she was that kind of girl; now she knew there wasn't any other.

I am aged with a sickness of the mind.

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

In the presence of a newly minted human being, I am reminded of what wholeness looks like. And I am sometimes moved to wonder, "Whatever became of me?

Teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see I have a chance to gain self knowledge and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject. In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self knowledge.

My life is not only about my strengths and virtues; it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow. An inevitable though often ignored dimension of the quest for "wholeness" is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.

The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials, is a profoundly moral regimen.

This was a step into darkness that I had been trying to avoid—the darkness of seeing myself more honestly than I really wanted to.

But for others, and I am one, the poet's words will be precise, piercing, and disquieting. They remind me of moments when it is clear—if I have eyes to see—that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. In those moments I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice. And in the spirit of the poet, I wonder: What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to be?