Quotes About Introspection

silence is the weapon, silence and people's need to fill it

Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.

If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people. -- Lazarus Long.

No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain.

The commonest weakness of our race is our ability to rationalize our most selfish purposes.

Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.

God forbid that I should ever be a good influence on anybody.

one of the few things I've learned is that humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn—when they do, which isn't often—on their own, the hard way.

And suddenly I knew I was people and could not stop laughing.

If tempted by something that feels "altruistic," examine your motives and root out that self-deception. Then, if you still want to do it, wallow in it!

He was delighted to recognize his own human name on two of the papers; he always got an odd thrill out of reading it, as if he were two places at once.

Time was when I was immune to emotional shocks. But as I get older, I don't get tougher; I get softer.

I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers... It is an invitation to think -- not to believe.

Congratulations! A desire not to butt into other people's business is eighty percent of all human wisdom.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards

the human mind's ability to rationalize its own shortcomings into virtues is unlimited

Just a man, with a face-shaped face

He did not expect reasonable conduct from human beings; he considered most people fit candidates for protective restraint and wet packs. He simply wished heartily that they would leave him alone!—all but the few he chose for playmates. He was firmly convinced that, left to himself, he would have long since achieved nirvana . . . dived into his own belly button and disappeared from view, like those Hindu jokers. Why couldn't they leave a man alone?

It's a shock to have it proved to you that you can't resist seducing yourself.

If I've reached the place where I'm a good influence on anybody, it's time I cultivated some new vices.

A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom . . . and the other twenty percent isn't very important.

have time to take out your soul and look at it.

because man is the animal that laughs at himself.

Well, I suppose it did.