Quotes About Introspection

Happy the man who lives long enough to acknowledge his ignorance

this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.

how much he loved being alone except when he didn't, except when it got to be too much?

To see your mother as a baby, that is what it's like, and therefore heartbreaking and wretched, and therefore also cleansing in some crooked way, the self wiped clean of static, pared down to its essentials, the human core that bore you, which was borne.

In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.

Je n'ai jamais cessé, tout au long de ma vie, de rechercher l'aide d'un homme. Je l'ai trouvée souvent et, plus souvent encore, elle m'a fait défaut.

Still, it was a sad state of the world that people judged others not by the best that they could be but by the worst thought in their own hearts.

It hardly mattered. She was tired of waiting for him to acknowledge who he was. Tired of donning a false mask of gaiety when she was so much more—felt so much more—beneath. No one had ever noticed her mask. No one but him. If he couldn't or wouldn't make the first move, then damn it, she would.

You've used me to punish yourself, haven't you? He watched dawning realization spread over her face, a confirmation more positive than anything she could ever say, and that arrow twisted deep in his chest. Yet still he had to ask the last question. Am I anything to you but a punishment?

It was the sad state of the world that people judged others not by the best that they could be but by the worst thought in their own hearts

I have no particular plan in life - and that's something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I'd be left alone to read

In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called by myself; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then-- ruins more than that, if you're not careful.

Looking down on their glossy heads, I realized that they were indeed threatened; they were simply unaware of it. We are all vulnerable.

I lay awake for hours in my twin bed next to the other, empty bed, feeling and hearing the spruces, the hemlocks, the rhododendron scraping at the partly open window, the verdant mountain out there in the night, the burgeoning of nature that did not seem to include me. And when, my restless body asked my teeming brain, had I agreed to be excluded?

Ich verstehe mit achtzig was ich mit siebzig noch nicht verstehen konnte, naemlich dass man am Ende so gut wie allen vergibt, nur sich selbst nicht.

I would not allow anyone into the center of myself; I would make myself a place to go, deep inside, no matter what happened.

But sometimes a man who is very good thinks, I am very bad, and it—destructs his life, everything. Because he does not believe that he has any right to do something, so he does less and less.

People seem to believe that despair is the same as anguish, but it is not. It's true that despair is surrounded by anguish, but at its core, despair is silent, a blank page.

I preferred solitude anyway; it was the medium in which I had been raised, in which I swam comfortably.

Better to embrace what lies within yourself than search for happiness in another,' she says. 'Don't be feared to discover your own power.

When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self—the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey.

If there is one thing that has made a difference in my life, it is the courage to turn and face what wants to change within me.

People think they're interesting. That's their first mistake.

Independence of vision is a good thing," Dorrin said. "So is thinking. But speaking and acting well require reflection—consideration.