Quotes About Introspection

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

The mind gets distracted in all sorts of ways. The heart is its own exclusive concern and diversion.

I'm condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in many ways, including everyday tasks.

In our daily lives, we see ourselves often in very reductive ways. I want to explore motion, change and flux, whether we are looking in the mirror or seeing ourselves in our surroundings. The singular view of self contradicts the act of living.

I never thought about my image. It interests me that there are people who do, that they seem to be methodical about it. Maybe things would have gone differently for me in some ways if I had.

I feel myself in ways to be the product of internalized male gaze.

In many ways, I think I'm still forming my ideas about my own identity in this world.

We're all biased, right, in many different ways - politically, religiously, ideologically, the way our family raised us - and that's fine. Nobody wants to live in a world where everybody thinks exactly the same. The key, though, is to try to figure out where your biases are holding you back from solving problems.

I thought of myself as an outsider in a lot of ways as I was growing up. Not in a bad way; more as an observer. I often find myself thinking as an observer of science fiction rather than as a participant.

'In many ways, I was born a hundred years too late. I often feel out of kilter with the modern world.

To me, 'The End of the Jews' - both the title and the novel itself - is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world.

We take nothing to the grave with us, but a good or evil conscience... It is true, terrors of conscience cast us down; and yet without terrors of conscience we cannot be raised up again.

For my art, there is a common theme most of the time: it is using the things we can see to search for the world we cannot see.

In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

I don't think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact, I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become?

My view is that we cannot be ruled by fear. When we do that, we are not making ourselves see. We are not thinking things through. We are not looking at what works.

I'm afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I'm afraid they'll mock me, think I'm ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously. I'm used to not being taken seriously, but only the 'light-hearted' Anne is used to it and can put up with it; the 'deeper' Anne is too weak.

By climbing mountains we were not learning how big we were. We were finding out how breakable, how weak and how full of fear we are.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

I Iike listening to people talking. I'm really interested in people's lives and what makes us work, what makes us weak, at times, and things that can make us stronger.