Quotes About Introspection

It must be exhausting to be in your head, Sam told me once. I think what he must have meant was it was exhausting for him to hear about it. I exhausted him. -Cackle by Kim Harrison

For Muir, Emerson and Thoreau were insufficiently wild; they thought from the head down, not feet up.

Oceans of clouds in my chest.

Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you.

Not that it would be wasting my time to chat in a bar with a good-looking woman, obviously, but I wanted to know as much as possible going in, because under the impact of a woman's direct gaze I am likely to suffer a mind wipe.

He came to realize that no one was watching him, no one was listening. The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies.

Sometimes," she said, wiping her eyes, "sometimes I wish I could stop being Toitovna. I get so tired of it, of everything that I've done." Michel sat beside her. "We're locked in our selves to the end. This is the price one pays for thought. But which would you rather be—convict, or idiot?

Take this moment right here, and ask yourself, What is now lacking?

Why don't you like it when you can't say why?

She walked through the city, trying to get away from herself.

So what's the point? Why do it all? Why not be content with what you've got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the fuck were they?

Only when things fall apart do you realize it can happen to you. You never think it can happen to you, until it does.

Buddhism begins in personal experience. Observation of one's surroundings and one's reactions, and one's thoughts.

The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies.

To conclude and temporarily halt this train of thought, how does any entity know what it is? Hypothesis: by the actions it performs. There is a kind of comfort in this hypothesis. It represents a solution to the halting problem. One acts, and thus finds out what one has decided to do.

She dismissed his puzzled frown with a wave.—We're deeper than we can see. There are other people down inside us doing things. We get carried along by what they do.

he had forgotten, if he had ever begun to understand, how small a part people played in others' lives and how little they knew about them, even if they saw them every day.

I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not.

It is a poor mind that is never in conflict.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart Or squash it flat? - a Bookshop Idyll

Malcolm said nothing to that. He swayed from side to side in his chair as a way of suggesting that life held many such small puzzles.

Het is nooit prettig om je diepste overtuigingen in hun historische context geplaatst te zien worden.

At 4 o'clock in the morning while the world sleeps off its judgment... (page 214)

Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn't know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve.