Quotes About Introspection

failure has a function. It asks you whether you really want to go on making things.

you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.

Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?

We are like Tolstoy's fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time. Your treasure – your perfection – is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.

I've never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.

Oh, I just want what we all want: a comfortable couch, a nice beverage, a weekend of no distractions and a book that will stop time, lift me out of my quotidian existence and alter my thinking forever.

She felt simultaneously relieved and burdened: relieved of all her old questions; burdened by the answers.

This much I do know - I'm exhausted by the cumulative consequences of a lifetime of hasty choices and chaotic passions.

What profound reward you must glean from studying the world so closely....Too many people turn away from small wonders, I find. There is so much more potency to be found in detail than generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it.

I only meant that there was a place within my imagination so fathomlessly deep that the light of the real world could never touch it.

When the dust has settled years later, we might ask ourselves, "What was I thinking?" and the answer is usually: You weren't. Psychologists call that state of deluded madness "narcissistic love." I call it "my twenties.

Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.

We must all get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something

When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward.

Because often what keeps you from creative living is your self-absorption (your self-doubt, your self-disgust, your self-judgment, your crushing sense of self-protection).

Hush," she said. "I'm thinking at the top of my lungs.

We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and morality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace.

What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this: 'Hello, God. How are you? I'm Liz. It's nice to meet you.' That's right- I was speaking tot he creator of the universe as though we'd just been introduced at a cocktail party. But we work with what we know in this life, and these are the words I always use at the beginning of a relationship. In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, I've always been a big fan of your work..

I am so consumed by wonder at their bravery. These people have left their families and lives behind for a few weeks to go into silent retreat amidst a crowd of perfect strangers in India. Not everybody does this in their lifetime.

My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup.

Not everything has an answer." Alma found this to be such a staggering piece of intelligence that she was struck dumb by it for several hours. All she could do was sit and ponder the notion in an amazed stupor.

I am openly prideful, secretly judgemental, and cowardly in conflict.

She did a little soul-searching, the way one does on the big birthdays. She asked herself when was the last time she'd felt truly light, joyous, and—yes—creative in her own skin. To her shock, she realized that it had been decades since she'd felt that way.

Looking for Truth is not some kind of spazzy free-for-all, not even during this, the great age of the spazzy free-for-all.