Quotes About Introspection

But the ultimate question is, Do the eyes receive other things than what the mind projects on them; aren't they really mirrors reflecting the mind's emissions? Perhaps we live in a world invented by ourselves.

Nina could scarcely believe a house could be as quiet as the one on Washington Street. Although there were moments when she missed her children, her main response to living apart from her husband was relief…[H]er current solitude was not just a respite, it was a time to contemplate her future options. Nina marveled that she had choices to consider.

God is not asking me to number my days to increase my pace but rather to examine my route, not to increase my efficiency but to see where I must make course corrections in heart, character, and actions.

Would it perturb you to see things as they are? To gaze at the world tranquilly and accept responsibility for your gaze, whatever it might see?

In one of them I am sixteen or seventeen years old. I am wearing, under a jacket of the Assistance Publique, a torn sweater. My face is an oval, very pure; my nose is smashed, flattened by a punch in some forgotten fight. The look on my face is blasé, sad and warm, very serious. My hair was thick and unruly. Seeing myself at that age, I expressed my feelings almost aloud: "Poor little fellow, you've suffered.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

In the second photo I am thirty years old. My face has hardened. The jaws are accentuated. The mouth is bitter and mean. I look like a hoodlum in spite of my eyes, which have remained gentle. Their gentleness is almost indiscernible because of the fixity of gaze imposed upon me by the official photographer. By means of these two pictures I can see the violence that animated me at the time: from the age of sixteen to thirty.

Humility can only be born out of humiliation

?wi?to?? to smutek

Dzi?ki temu,?e powiedzia? mi,i? nie ?yj?,pogodzi?em si? z faktem,?e ludzie wyrzucili mnie ze swoich my?li

when at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life, I refuse to let this moment and all the others be waste matter; using their suffering, I project myself to the mind's heaven.

En prison on ferme plus de portes qu'on n'en ouvre.

O que é que tu tens? Agora já podes parecer contigo. Retoma teu rosto. Vamos, Claire, volta a ser minha irmã...

AINSI JE RESTE SEUL, oublié de lui qui dort dans mes bras. La mer est calme. Je n'ose bouger. Sa présence serait plus terrible que son voyage hors de moi. Peut­ être vomirait-il sur ma poitrine. Et qu'y pourrais-je faire ? Trier ses vomissures ? y chercher parmi le vin, la viande, la bile, ces violettes et ces roses qu'y délayent et délient les filets de sang ?

Il ne savait pas encore que tout événement de notre vie n'a d'importance que la résonance qu'il trouve en nous, que le degré qu'il nous fait franchir vers l'ascétisme

On ne se refait pas; il faut s'utiliser tel qu'on est. Ça ne s'adapte pas toujours. De là les peines.

Tu veux savoir ce qu'il faut faire, et tu ne connais pas seulement le monde où tu vis. Tu comprends que quelque chose est contre toi, et tu ne sais pas quoi.

Il faut se moquer, en tout cas se méfier des bâtisseurs d'avenir. Surtout quand pour bâtir l'avenir des hommes à naître, ils ont besoin de faire mourir les hommes vivants. L'homme n'est la matière première que de sa propre vie.

Getting old always means a hardening of the main trait of one's character.

When the world is tipping beneath you and you are tumbling even when you are sitting, even when you are sleeping (especially when you are sleeping), any place is the same as any other place.

Deep inside him, so deep even he would not have known how to excavate it, was the rank, gangrenous fear that he was not entirely the intellectual being he had long ventriloquized.

But the goodness in the letter affected her now, and it occurred to her, not for the first time, that Mark had always saved the best of himself for the people he dealt with in his professional life, though perhaps—and this did strike her for the first time—she had done that as well.

The answer was no longer of any concern, only its attendant truth, which she'd figured out years ago and had never once questioned: her mother loathed her, and probably always had. What was she supposed to do with such information? Exactly.

and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.