Quotes About Introspection

in the end, everyone can understand themselves only. You are the only one to which you never have to explain what you mean. Everything else is misunderstanding.

Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun.

I sit on my narrow bunk and caress my long yellow toenails and stare at my walls.

Deep in her secret heart, in the pure place she protects, she is afraid she will always be alone—that she will go through life without being known. And she will not survive that.

Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.

Doubt is the origin of wisdom

I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.

For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance

At last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.

Yes, I pray and go to church and read my Bible. But sometimes I shake my fist at God. It's not the picture of peace I realize, and I certainly make no claims of wearing the armor of God. I'm lucky if I can get the underwear of decency on, all right?

Find my weak points, but more importantly, find yours.

No decent art ever came out of self-pity.

It is a terrible thing To be so open: it is as if my heart Put on a face and walked into the world. —SYLVIA PLATH, "A POEM FOR THREE VOICES

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to. —THOMAS HARDY

Everything you need to heal is inside yourself. You only need support and encouragement to listen to yourself—to your thoughts, feelings, imagery, and inner spiritual urgings. A book, like a therapist or group, can only guide you, helping you to say out loud what you dared not say even to yourself.

I drew against a hum in my head that was like happiness.

Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match. ... One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue.

Increasingly solitary, he saw his life as all that was left to him: a tattered sail that might bear the wind but would bring him to no haven.

APRIL 9 TAKING YOUR OWN body and mind as the laboratory, engage in some thoroughgoing research on your own mental functioning, and examine the possibility of making some positive changes within yourself.

FEBRUARY 5 FOR DISCOVERING ONE'S true inner nature, I think one should try to take out some time, with quiet and relaxation, to think more inwardly and to investigate the inner world. That may help. Then sometimes when one is very much involved in hatred or attachment, if there is time or possibility during that very moment, just try to look inward and ask: 'What is attachment? What is the nature of anger?

THE IMAGE WE have of ourselves readily tends to be complacent. We look at ourselves with indulgence. When something unpleasant happens to us, we always have the tendency to cast the blame on others, or on fate, a demon, or a god. We shrink from descending into ourselves, as the Buddha recommended.

Stella couldn't help but feel she'd diminished him too—regulating him to nothing more than a good time. But his being there, his love and concern—his ability to encourage her alternative thinking—had her ready to reconsider.

The real enemy of the Christian Right is not Americans United or the ACLU; it is themselves.