Quotes About Introspection

Johnny Watters bends down, sponge in his hand, tongue in your ear, he whispers, "How shall we live, Brian? How shall we live?

They will want answers. Then they'll want silence.

Socrates had it backward. He thought the unexamined life is not worth living. I think no one's life holds up to examination. The more time you spend thinking the more you notice that everyone else is doing something better or more important than you.

One thing I've learned is that just because you can successfully lie to yourself doesn't mean you're not completely transparent to the people you love.

What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.

There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it's really true: I should have stayed home.

There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness.

Look at all the sentences which seem true and question them.

Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.

We can actually reconstruct our past by examining what we think, say, feel, expect, believe, and do in an intimate relationship now.

We go mad to become sane sometimes.

A great hope fell You heard no noise The ruin was within Oh cunning wreck that told no tale And let no witness in…. A not admitting of the wound Until it grew so wide That all my life had entered it And there was room beside…

Beings as complex as ourselves need retreats from others to explore the depths of our character and our destiny. We need regular periods of solitude to replenish ourselves, to locate new sources of creativity and self-knowledge, and to discover possibilities in our souls that are invisible when we are with others.

Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of this encouraging possibility in his address at Harvard Divinity School in 1838: "We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

The tragic youth was going down on me (...) I've been right and I've been wrong Now I'm back where I started from Never looked over reality's shoulder

We all often think about what's easy to think about, rather than what's right to think about.

we see the world as we are, not as the world is.

One of the difficulties of stretching ourselves is that we tend to see ourselves as our limitations, not as our potential. We're lost in our own world.

I find myself thinking, "I'm not so sure this is a great idea." I find myself saying, "Great.

Still, isn't it nice to be nice, to hold a breath? Isn't it good to save up for it, and really relish it, just sometimes?

When I have a particular case in hand," he explained, "I . . . love to dig up the question by the roots and hold it up and dry it before the fires of the mind.

Whitman would be appalled in the 1850s when holiday celebrations began to be mass-oriented spectacles manipulated by professionals. One of his most famous poetic lines—" I celebrate myself"—can be taken, on one level, as an attempt to restore the idea of celebration, which was fast becoming coldly manipulative, to the personal and genuinely celebratory.

His expressions of psychological depression in his notebooks (such as "Every thing I have done seems to me blank and suspicious") doubtless lay behind brooding lines like these: The doubts of the daytime and the doubts of the nighttime.… the curious whether and how, Whether that which appears so is so.… Or is it all flashes and specks?

Artists, on the other hand, talk to determine what works, what does not, and why. Their focus is more on the micro; it moves from the inside out.