Quotes About Introspection

I'm not saying Barra's bad, exactly, but I am saying you think she's good at heart because you like her and want her to be good at heart. It doesn't work that way. If you don't learn to see people as they are, you'll get hurt someday.

Right now, let's get back to the other connections between what happened and the things you quit doing, quit enjoying.

I love you, he said flatly. I--love--you. Shall I elaborate? I have loved you. I do love you. I will love you. I didn't want to love you. I tried not to love you. I will undoubtably regret loving you, but--God help me--I love you--so much.

I want to clean myself like the window of a house, make myself clear for things to pass through. Flat and quiet.

Its best to turn to no one, to seek to please no one, as if there were only oneself in the world. The pleasure of others is a by-product after all, and if ever the whispering voices are allowed to crowd out the one voice, the result is this...a sort of high-pitched silliness, a terrible silliness.

There's no summing-up, but a sense of incompleteness. After years of building up each unique personality, in the end there is no moment of putting lines beneath the sum and adding up to see what it all amounts too.

She felt locked away in herself, but ignorant of her identity, and often she awoke suddenly in the night, without any idea of who she was; thinking, firstly, that she had died.

She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.

Here was the world wide-awake and yet only for me, all the fresh pure air only for me, all the fragrance breathed only by me, not a living soul hearing the nightingale but me, the sun in a few moments coming up to warm only me.

Nor would I willingly miss the early darkness and the pleasant firelight tea and the long evenings among my books.

Once more she had that really rather disgusting suspicion that her life till now had not only been loud but empty.

But while admiring my neighbour, I don't think I shall ever try to follow in her steps, my talents not being of the energetic and organising variety, but rather of that order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of poetry and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and, sitting on a willow trunk beside a little stream, forget the very existence of everything but green pastures and still waters, and the glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields.

I's lonely to stay inside oneself.

How good it is to look sometimes across great spaces, to lift one's eyes from narrowness, to feel the large silence that rests on lonely hills!

and everybody will have what they never yet have had, a certain amount of that priceless boon, leisure-- leisure to sit down and look at themselves, and inquire what it is they really mean, and really want, and really intend to do with their lives.

What a place for him who intends to pass an examination, to write a book, or who wants the crumples got by crushing together too long with his fellows to be smoothed out of his soul.

Penso che risulterebbe stancante essere legati per l'eternità al culmine dei momenti più ispirati dei massimi scrittori. Altitudini come quelle sarebbero inadatte a insetti come me. Su questi libri elevati me ne starei aggrappata alla bell'e meglio, con la testa e le ali penzolanti. E forse che anche l'anima non ha voglia, di tanto in tanto, di mettersi in vestaglia?

Straordinario come ci si sente soli, laggiù nel profondo dell'animo, se manca un compagno di esultanze.

Wissen Sie, was das für ein Segen ist, die Werke eines Dichters zu lesen, seinen Geist zu kennen, das Beste an ihm, und dabei so entfernt von seiner Heimat, seiner Lebensgeschichte oder seinen Briefen zu leben, dass alles Geschwätz über sein Privatleben und Kritik an seiner Moral nicht zu mir gedrungen ist?

the sky paled to green, a few stars looked out faintly, a light twinkled in the solitary house on Vilm, and the waiter came down and asked if he should bring a lamp. A lamp! As though all one ever wanted was to see the tiny circle round oneself, to be able to read the evening paper, or write postcards to one's friends, or sew. I have a peculiar capacity for doing nothing and yet enjoying myself. To

Was it possible that loneliness had nothing to do with circumstances, but only with the way one met them?

and knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own blessedness

May 2nd.—Last night after dinner, when we were in the garden, I said, I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they will be told that I am out, or away, or sick.

Was she the same person to-night as last night? Was she two persons? If she was only one, which one? Or was she a mere vessel of receptiveness, a transparent vessel into which other people poured their view of her, and she instantly reflected the exact colour of their opinion?