Quotes About Introspection

He himself felt frightened and alarmed when he reflected on the inevitability of old age, sickness and death. He became silent and withdrawn.

Koan study is specifically designed to short-circuit the whole intellectual process and experience reality directly.

We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.

It's surprising what we allow ourselves to feel as 'living' and only later notice our suppression when we finally open up and tell ourselves the truth.

Here I am, alone again, alone but not completely by myself, alone without the freedom of not having to think about someone else

I'm not a hermit.  I'm just an introvert, which means I like people, but I don't find parties exciting.  They tire me out—.

One of these days, you're going to fall in love with some guy, and you're not going to know what to do with yourself.

If toes had eyes, then I could see how my feet know where to go, but toes are blind. And how is it that my tongue speaks words it cannot hear? Because for all its eloquence, the tongue itself is deaf, and flaps in soundlessness.

You would be much better off in reading this book if you asked yourself who you are, rather than asked who I am, for you cannot understand what I am unless you understand the nature of personality and the characteristics of consciousness.

I believe only in art and failure.

In her minds eye she sat there, in the domesticated golden sunlight on the velvet sofa, lapped around by carpets and books and mahogany, solitary and content, as if, in fact, cloistered.

People are only taken seriously as they take themselves.

trouble with people is, they always think they have to talk.

You want to know what's going on in someone's life? Ask them how they feel first thing in the morning.

I began to listen to myself more... Trusting myself, I discovered, meant giving up control over my decisions. The choice came from me, but not from the part of me that used to decide—the mind that weighed, the mind that projected scenarios, the mind that controlled.

He pushed the coverlet halfway down his body and crossed his arms behind his head. Linc stared at the overhead fixture, his new best friend for the last several days--he'd actually felt like talking to it a few times.

Things weren't real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better. You could never just listen to a boy play guitar, you'd have to turn it into a poem, make it all about you.

Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Lonliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best thing you can do it know yourself... know what you want.

You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.

A writer must stand on the rock of her self and her judgment or be swept away by the tide or sink in the quaking earth: there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

I did not know my own identity. I was burgled of body and hung in the sky like a woman of straw.

grip and focus beyond the powers of many of those who have spent a lifetime without their sanity being examined or questioned.

Remember, as you look at yourself, to look kindly, and also remember that you are not balancing a checkbook: anything you see that you don't like, or that you want to change, is not a debit that you subtract from your virtues.

You can never be happy until you understand why you're doing what you're doing.