Quotes About Introspection

As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realize how insignificant they are.

I may have done some other things as good but I am sure none better. I haven't matured, progressed, grown, become deeper, wiser, or funnier. But then, I never thought I would. (Peter Cook about Beyond the Fringe)

Once again I felt light-headed, but this time it wasn't from the scent of lilacs; it was from the scent of my own death.

I do feel like I have important, beautiful things to say about the world, I just can't think of them at this particular instant.

My thoughts are really all I think about.

I would like to make you more aware of yourself as a human, and thus, ultimately a better person.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gather itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate.

Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

When the dust clears and in the quiet of your own heart, what kind of God do you believe in, really? And why?

Doubt is what being cornered by our thinking looks like. Doubt happens when needing to be certain has run its course.

The broader we cast our net, the deeper we wind up owning our own thoughts.

I didn't know how to "do" faith without making sure my thoughts about God were lined up, and so, once those thoughts failed to be compelling, my faith sank.

Doubt can certainly leave us empty and frightened, but that is precisely the benefit of doubt: it exposes the folly that strong faith means you need to "know what you believe," that the more faith you "have," the more certain you are.

The big lesson I learned from wrestling with my own curveballs is how deeply my faith in God had been cemented in fear—which is to say, how I viewed God as very much antagonistic toward me. And so any thought on my part of listening to my experiences and interrogating my inherited faith—to inspect its boundaries let alone climb over its walls—was seen as a crisis that had to be averted or at least resolved immediately.

But at least I didn't do any harm. Along the way I came to see more and more that being right about God and making sure everyone else agreed with what I knew might not be the most important thing I could do in God's eyes.

To live by faith—to live wisely—means living with an ever-increasing awareness of the hidden things, not simply a detached general knowledge that, say, "Money can be harmful," but a deep knowledge of ourselves, a true self-awareness of what money is doing to me . . . right now.

Pompous old farts need to have the piss taken out of them every now and then." She put her hands together in Buddhist fashion, and crossed her eyes. "It puts them in touch with their Oneness.

I love humans, all humans. I often think that perhaps I was born into the wrong species.

The term "reflective function" (RF) refers to the operationalization of the psychological processes underlying the capacity to mentalize—

interpret their own and others' behavior by attributing mental states

Do not become what you dispise.

Do not become what you despise.