Quotes About Introspection

Knowing yourself is probably the hardest job in the world.

Knowing yourself and possessing self-awareness allows you to make more mindful decisions that are right for you.

First principles thinking is the practice of getting behind this tendency to follow, and to question everything you think is set in stone and realizing that they are probably assumptions.

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.

The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.

I fell asleep among the beer mugs and when I woke, I couldn't think where I was.

Alice: Did you phone her, beg her to come back - when you went for lovely walks? Dan: Yes. Alice: You're a piece of shit.

Thinking and contents are to be left alone. The "I" is not to intervene as if it exercised mastery over these contents.

the only correct approach, is to attend to the anger so that you may learn what it is. Anger is nothing you have been told.

The prism through which the world shows itself to me is mine.

only he could enjoy one day of self-forgetfulness without having to pour a bottle of whiskey down his neck to achieve oblivion by the evening.

I am not, as you will have observed, a man greatly enamored of his fellow human beings. I do not enter lightly into the foibles and whimsicalities of others, I do not suffer fools gladly, I seem able, in conversation, only to needle or be needled. My relationships, as a result, are few, and those few are tenuous, prickly sorts of arrangements, altogether lacking in the spontaneity and intimacy for which humans, I'm told, have an instinctive need. I am aware of no such instincts myself.

As we shook hands I wondered idly what her urine looked like.

I often wondered how it would be to tramp off into the mountains and keep going until I was exhausted, then simply sink into the snow and fall asleep. Then the wolves could have me. To want to die in the forest and be eaten by wolves: another marker of incipient madness.

Être éveillé, c'est souffrir; voila le sens profond de la vie.

Solitude is a terrible thing, for it permits the imagination to picture, in detail, that which perhaps should never be articulated.

One should never expect anyone to reply to one's questions.

I was happy when I walked the streets of Paris by myself.

When he was younger, he used the slightest opportunity to slip away from people, without his being able to understand very clearly why he did so: a longing to break free and to breathe in the fresh air?

Sundays, especially in late afternoon, if you are alone, open a breach in time.

il semble que ce qui vous pousse brusquement à la fugue, ce soit un jour de froid et de grisaille qui vous rend encore plus vive la solitude et vous fait sentir encore plus fort qu'un étau se resserre.

In those days, I thought I was happy.

The letters dance before my eyes. Who am I?

The other day, I happened to walk through it. I had a strange sensation. Not that time had passed, but that another me, a twin, was prowling around there -- down to the smallest detail, and until the end of time -- through what I had experienced over a very short period.