Quotes About Introspection

For I am nothing if not critical.

Who is it that says most? which can say moreThan this rich praise,—that you alone are you?

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I.

O! that I were as greatAs is my grief, or lesser than my name,Or that I could forget what I have been,Or not remember what I must be now.

I am slow of study.

My lungs began to crow like chanticleer,That fools should be so deep-contemplative,And I did laugh sans intermissionAn hour by his dial.

Must I hold a candle to my shames?

I shall ne'er be ware of mine own wit, till I break my shins against it.

Within the book and volume of my brain.

Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,With what I most enjoy contented least;Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,Haply I think on thee.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought And with old woes new wail my dear times' waste.

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.

In my mind's eye, Horatio.

How all occasions do inform against me,And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,If his chief good and market of his timeBe but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.Sure he that made us with such large discourse,Looking before and after, gave us notThat capability and godlike reasonTo fust in us unus'd.

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice take each man's censure but reserve thy judgement.

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.

Speak to me as to thy thinkings, As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts The worst of words.

Thou shalt be both the plaintiff and the judge of thine own cause.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

We know what we are, but not what we may be.

I learn more from books than from people

It happens. Life (or death) taps you on the shoulder, interrupts what you're doing, and suddenly you find that nobody has been bothering you but yourself.

He had been "drunken" on their rhythms. But now his mind had gone silent, and sitting alone with nothing to do in his remote cabin, all seemed lost. The wind rattled at the door. "It is sad," Steinbeck said in closing, "when the snow is falling.