Quotes About Introspection

This means that you yourself are largely the agent of anything bad that happens to you. With more prudence, wiser policies, and greater vision, you could have avoided the danger. So when something goes wrong, look deep into yourself—not in an emotional way, to blame yourself or indulge your feelings of guilt, but to make sure that you start your next campaign with a firmer step and greater vision.

For my life, I confess to you, feels to me today somewhat narrow and circumscribed.

You see all the other fellows were so active and earnest and all that sort of thing- always rampaging, and skirmishing, and scouring the desert sands, and pacing the margin of the sea, and chasing knights all over the place, and devouring damsels, and going on generally- whereas I liked to get my meals regular and then to prop my back against a bit of rock and snooze a bit, and wake up and think of things going on and how they kept going on just the same, you know!

Once well underground, you know exactly where you are. Nothing can happen to you, and nothing can get at you. You're entirely your own master and you don't have to consult anybody or mind what they say. Things go on all the same overhead, and you let 'em, and don't bother about 'em. When you want to, up you go, and there the things are, waiting for you.

Indeed, I have been a complete ass, and I know it.

For instance, when I flung the cat out of an upper window (though I did it from no ill-feeling, and it didn't hurt the cat), I was ready, after a moment's reflection, to own I was wrong, as a gentleman should. But was the matter allowed to end there? I trow not.

I wasn't ready For you. I understood nothing Seemingly except my feelings You were whirling In your life I was keeping Everything in my head To Marina

I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.

It was as though, in one moment, he had become a stranger. And I a stranger to myself.

Why hell, look at us. Old men alone. Decrepit old bachelors out here in the country seventeen miles from the closest town which don't amount to much of a good goddamn even when you get there. Think of us. Crotchety and ignorant. Lonesome. Independent. Set in all our ways. How you going to change now at this age of life? I can't say, Raymond said. But I'm going to. That's what I know.

Who does ever get what they want? It doesn't seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It's always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings. Except I still say that this isn't true of you and me. Not right now, not today.

You're going to mess this up, do you know that? You don't even see what's in front of you. You're like everybody else. No, I'm not. You're dreaming backward.

When he reached the wire gate he stopped and stood looking back toward the horse barn and the cow lots. Then he raised his head and peered up at the stars. He spoke aloud. You dumb old son of a bitch, he said. You dumb old ignorant stupid son of a bitch. Then

I told you I don't want to live like that anymore—for other people, what they think, what they believe. I don't think it's the way to live. It isn't for me anyway. All right. I wish I had your good sense. You're right, of course. Are you over it now? I'm getting there. Do you want another beer? No. But if you want more wine I'll sit here with you while you drink it. I'll just watch you.

Aún el diablo puede llorar cuando mira alrededor del infierno y se da cuenta de que está ahí, solo.-Acheron

What can be quieter than standing alone in a crowd of strangers?

After four hundred and ninety-nine years of existence, Connor Buchanan arrived at an inescapable conclusion regarding himself. He was a coldhearted old bastard.

If I'm such a bloody hero, why am I alone?

As much as others may need to change, or we may want them to change, the only person we can continually inspire, prod, and shape—with any degree of success—is the person in the mirror. There

I have known a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common. —OUIDA

For a long time that had seemed to her to be the key to life: Life--real life--was just a solitude waiting to be transfigured. If Phillip was with her, the solitude she needed would be shattered, and along with it whatever wondrous thing might have come her way if she had been alone.

There is funny ha-ha, and there is funny peculiar, and beneath a trapdoor in Kevin's mind is a place where the two blur together, the place of jokes, churning so furiously frequently, when it kicks up a line, he has no idea what it will turn out to be.

He feels the way he used to feel passing love notes to girls in elementary school. Do you like me? the notes always read. Check yes or no. But he is older now and his question is older, too, not Do you like me? but Shouldn't someone?

Not that he truly wished them dead--that wasn't quite it--but more and more often, when the man considered his lifelong friends, his colleagues, even his wife and sons, he felt that their image of him had become so mildewed by habit or complicated by misunderstanding that he took comfort in the idea of their mortality: the thought that soon, very soon, they would die and he would no longer have to be the person they had concluded he was.