Quotes About Introspection

You like so much to be alone? Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely. She

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.

I can't bear to see myself in my own thoughts—I hate ugliness, you know

She had once shown him the impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent behaviour seemed to prove that he had accepted the situation with a reasonableness somewhat mortifying to her vanity.

Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

Was she beautiful—or was she only someone apart?

she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.

But there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance, of littleness, of futile bravado, in sitting there puffing my cigarette-smoke into the face of such a past.

Granice was overcome by the futility of any further attempt to inculpate himself. He was chained to life - a 'prisoner of consciousness'.

I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the 'Letters,'" said Mrs. Touchett. "It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the roots — her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn't care; who couldn't have cared. I don't mean to read another line; it's too much like listening at a keyhole.

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." ? Edith Wharton

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

The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.

It is generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles and design.

La meditación divina es una poderosa ayuda para engendrar en nosotros un desprecio del mundo y de todas las cosas mundanas

At this rate, he felt, he might even live to see the day when novelists described their characters by some other device than that of manoeuvring them into examining themselves in mirrors.

his reverie merged discouragingly into the austere reality of the classroom.

It's hard to evaluate the validity of a belief you're scarcely aware of—you just accept it as is.

Taking responsibility means you don't blame anyone else for your difficulties. It also means that you don't blame yourself.

Man with the Muckrake

Reading, as he has explained to Trevelyan, is for him the purest imaginative therapy.

Le Chasseur des solitudes).

We were losers who talked a winning game. No wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. If she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous.

What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth?