Quotes About Introspection

I spent my youth building this wall to keep dangerous things away. I sometimes wonder now if I've kept them inside.

Oh, Oiseau, you want Independence, but that idea weighs you down like handcuffs. First, be free before the idea. Then: make a list of the things in your head and in your stomach that chain you up. That's where it starts, that struggle of yours...

He was not a scholar – his brain seemed too sluggish or too dreamy to grasp the things demanded of it – but he was never happier than when left alone among books, and would spend hours turning the pages of atlases, novels or tales from history, alive to the alternative versions of himself they seemed to proffer.

He is like a traveler who looks left and right but doesn't think to look behind or above him. Men like that get eaten by cougars.

I'm a hopeless conversationalist. I'd always rather listen.

The feeling of the morning after the night before is not a sensation endured by the dissolute only: every morning, for every human being, is in some sort a morning after the night before...

Imagination, not reason, is the chief faculty of the soul.

We cannot solve mysteries - we can only enter into them; and then it is we who are solved or dissolved - transformed in such a way that we see the "problem" quite differently

However much we wish the soul's path to be straight, upward, and ascending, it is more likely to be meandering, full of regressions, downward turns, and backward glances.

We are more like a many-faceted whole, and it is our task in the course of a lifetime to realize each facet of our selves - a journey that is more likely to be downward, circular, and labyrinthine than upward, onward, and straight.

The idea of imagination implies deep participation and the harnessing of real desires in order to effect self-transformation

The soul needs feeding - where "feeding" signifies heeding.

The unconscious reflects back at us the face we show to it.

We cultivate soul by seeking depth, interiority, and connectedness - in short, by exercising imagination.

Walt Whitman: I am larger, better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness.

I think this early interest was the beginning of my obsession. My sexual interests and cutting up dead animals slowly merged. I don't remember being sexually stimulated as a kid when I was engaged in this behavior, but I do know that it gave me great pleasure and that it consumed a lot of my time and thoughts. At any rate, the two thoughts became one, and I couldn't think about sex with a man without also having thoughts of cutting open his human body and examining the insides.

I never heard voices. It possibly could have been the devil. I don't know, but I do know that at the time I formulated my decisions to kill, thoughts of the devil never entered into it. I knew something was compelling me to act, but I figured that it was my own selfish, sick need to gratify myself in this way. I just don't know.

This will force you to dig deep, exercise your creative half, and find the positive insight in any topic that arises.

First, ask yourself why you feel that way. What is the exact moment and action that caused the feeling? Is it something big, or small and isolated?

Si no eres consciente de cómo puedes proyectar tus propias necesidades, miedos, suposiciones y prejuicios en los demás, tus observaciones y conclusiones sobre los demás no serán gran cosa. De hecho, es posible que simplemente hayas descubierto una forma indirecta de aprender sobre ti mismo y el equipaje cognitivo y emocional que tú dejas ver.

When you make a statement to yourself like I'm a loser, nobody likes me, or I'm not worth talking to, pause and give yourself time and space. Do the next four things in sequence. First, ask yourself why you feel that way. What is the exact moment and action that caused the feeling? Is it something big, or small and isolated?

Remember, you're not doing nothing—you're taking action through nonaction.

if you give them the opportunity to create a three-dimensional identity for themselves, you might find aspects of them that you actually enjoy or admire—or at least defensible justification for why they are the way they are.

When you start thinking, "Why did she say that?" and "What made him do that?" instead of immediately reacting, that's the beginning of your path to emotional intelligence.