Quotes About Introspection

Nobody believes me, but to be honest the pressure is not something that I feel.

No one believes that they're a bad person at the end of the day.

We have had a rewarding relationship, the belly and I.

I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.

I don't care about being a literary personality - that doesn't appeal to me, especially because the literary world doesn't appeal to me. I actually don't feel like I even belong in it. If this was high school, I would be sitting with the Goths, looking at everyone, being like, 'Whatever.'

I always knew I belonged on the other side of the lens.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.

It is simply a practical way to be more in touch with the fullness of your being through a systematic process of self-observation, self-inquiry, and mindful action.

rather than rushing headlong into things with a mind that is sorely out of touch with large parts of ourself, a mind driven by narrow ambition and ideas of personal gain. The story says we can only fare well if we proceed with an awareness of the way things are, including a willingness to admit not knowing where we are going.

Every time you get a strong impulse to talk about meditation and how wonderful it is, or how hard it is, or what it's doing for you these days, or what it's not, or you want to convince someone else how wonderful it would be for them, just look at it as more thinking and go meditate some more.

It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. All else is mere thinking.

cannot be imposed, legislated, or decreed. They can only be cultivated, and

When Thoreau says, "it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished," this is waving a red flag in front of a bull for go-getting, progress-oriented people. But who is to say that his realizations of one morning spent in his doorway are less memorable or have less merit than a lifetime of busyness, lived with scant appreciation for stillness and the bloom of the present moment?

Guess what? When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that's what you've wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that's what's on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, how are you going to handle it? In other words, Now what?

But waking up is ultimately something that each one of us can only do for ourselves. When it comes down to it, wherever you go, there you are

in the meditation practice, it is best to hold to and honor one's own direct experience, and not worry too much about whether this is what you are supposed to feel or see or think about.

When you begin to question the narrative of yourself and inquire as to who is even doing all of this talking inside your own head, you may come to realize that you have no idea!

Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.

He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.

I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.

But some things are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.

to explore the inner country of his own soul.

Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.

An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one's attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.