Quotes About Introspection

For Peter, it was as if he was the first Adam. He felt the gaze of the holy and couldn't have felt more naked.

Satire is enjoyable compensation for being forced to think.

Even brave men, and D'Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.

Thuvia of Ptarth was having difficulty in determining the exact status of the Prince of Helium in her heart. She

and also with sufficient good judgment to appreciate that while he might enjoy the contemplation of his superiority to the masses, there was little likelihood of the masses being equally entranced by the same cause.

missing. All I knew was that whatever I was looking for, I couldn't find it with anyone

Euripides questioned everything. He was a misanthrope who preferred books to men.

Since there is so much that you know about me, can you tell me something about yourself? Some true thing? She asked, watching him, realizing that she knew nothing of the actual man that hid beneath the blandly smiling, smooth exterior that he presented. Some true thing? He laughed. Oh my dear, there is no true thing about me at all.

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty...But I am too busy thinking about myself.

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one's center of life inside of one's self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one's inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact!

Absent- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.

The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person.

But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.

The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied.

But he could never be long without trying to find a reason for what she was doing . . .

She knew herself by heart too, and was sick of the old story.