Quotes About Introspection

We believe that the applause of silence is the only kind that counts.

Everything seems so small here now, old, mashed-in, more rundown even than I remember it, but with a heartbreaking familiarity at each door that makes me wonder if I can take in anything new, so strongly do I feel in Brownsville that I am walking in my sleep.

In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratifications, is a curious anticlimax.

One writes to make a home for oneself on paper, in time, in other's minds.

All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.

And ah for a man to arise in me,That the man I am may cease to be!

The long mechanic pacings to and fro,The set gray life, and apathetic end.

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.

Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.

de los placeres de un solitario, el más grande es hacer el ridículo sin que nadie lo vea.

Any one who sits in reverie thus, of course, may see similar ridiculous pictures when the will no longer guides construction. The incongruities of dreams are thus explained.

The spell of these terrible solitudes ... cannot leave any mind untouched, any mind, that is, possessed of the higher imaginative qualities.

Our thoughts make spirals in their world.

the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.

You know," he went on almost under his breath, "every man who thinks for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart, and believes that one day he'll come across, either in a book or in a person, the Priest who shall make it clear to him.

I wish I were not quite so lonely—and so poor. And yet I love both my loneliness and my poverty. The former makes me appreciate the companionship of the wind and rain, while the latter preserves my liver and prevents me wasting time in dancing attendance upon women.

It is, of course, extremely interesting to look back across the years questioningly, wonderingly, objectively, without detachments, though seeing "objectively" does not necessarily imply seeing truthfully.

he found all religions uninteresting because, almost without exception, they start from the present and speculate ahead as to what men shall become, instead of looking back and speculating why men have got here as they are.

The world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but the memory of it. Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.

Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour; The heavy white limbs, and the cruel Red mouth like a venomous flower; When these have gone by with their glories, What shall rest of thee then, what remain, O mystic and somber Delores, Our Lady of Pain?

I have to have time to think. Why does time run on while a man thinks?

Time will come when one's safety lies in ten things: nine of which are in staying aloof from men, and the tenth in staying silent.