Quotes About Introspection

The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

It is the struggle with darkness and grief that educates the male soul.

Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.

We mend and renew the world by strengthening inside ourselves what we seek outside ourselves, and not by demanding it of others or trying to force it on others.

I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.

Genuine humility is based on a realistic self-appraisal and a healthy feeling of self-worth.

A.A. is the only group I know that is willing and honest enough to just tell people up front, "You are damn selfish!" Or, "Until you get beyond your massive narcissism you are never going to grow up.

Organized religion is an accountability system that holds your feet to the fire long enough to know what the issues really are, who God might just be, and what your own limitations might also be.

I worry about "true believers" who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Mother Teresa learned to do. People who are so certain always seem like Hamlet's

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting.

We cannot heal what we do not first acknowledge.

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

Most of us tend to think of the second half of life

Am I willing to walk into the wilds of my interior life without knowing what I'll find?

Because far too many religious folks do not seriously pursue this "reverence humming within them," they do not recognize

It has been said that 90 percent of people seem to live 90 percent of their lives on cruise control, which is to be unconscious.

The self-same moment that we find God in ourselves, we also find ourselves inside God

It takes uncommon humility to carry both the dark and the light side of things. The only true perfection available to humans is the honest acceptance of our imperfection.

Scott Peck's major insight in his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled. He told me personally once that he felt most Western people were just spiritually lazy. And when we are lazy, we stay on the path we are already on, even if it is going nowhere. It is the spiritual equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: everything winds down unless some outside force winds

What made us think we were

But it takes us much longer to discover "the task within the task," as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.

One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them.

Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own...Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do...

So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.