Quotes About Introspection

I am alone. It is evening. There is a light fog. The sky is covered by a thin milky-golden tissue. If I only knew what is there—higher. If I only knew who I am. Which I am I?

it is twenty-two-thirty. Till tomorrow, then. Record Four The Wild Man with a Barometer – Epilepsy – If * * * * * * * Until today everything in life seemed to me clear (that is why, I think, I always had a sort of partiality toward the word "clear"), but today...

But how explain all of myself, all of my sickness, recorded in these pages? And I subsided and walked obediently. ... A leaf torn off a tree by a sudden blast of wind obediently falls downward, but on the way it whirls, catches at every familiar branch, fork, knot And I, too, was catching at every silent spherical head, at the transparent ice of the walls, at the blue spire of the Accumulator Tower piercing a cloud.

You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.

Much of what one does--to avoid suffering, to seek happiness, to stay healthy--is to keep a safe space for one's private language.

recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction.

Reading Turgenev":

Our life, we realize, is not as happy as we have been taught to think.

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

Being known, then, must not be far from being imprisoned by someone else's thought

A glimpse into the depth of other people's misfortunes makes us cling to the hope that suffering is measurable. There are more sorrowful sorrows, more despondent despondencies. When we recognize another's suffering, we cannot avoid confronting our own, from which we escape to the thought of measurability. Well, at least, we emphasize. Our capacity to console extends only to what we can do to console ourselves.

I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I had never been born.

Though evasion rarely leads to joy; there is, one must admit, a sense of joy if one can dissect something, oneself included, with precision.

What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What makes you forget the good things in your life and your responsibilities toward others? One hides from people who ask these unanswerable questions only to ask them oneself again and again.

Reading, however, is a kind of private freedom: out of time, out of place.

What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one's self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

Meditation is silence. If you realize that you really know nothing, then you will be truly meditating. Such truthfulness is the right soil for silence. Silence is meditation.

Still, being alone doesn't mean you have to be miserable. In that sense it's different from losing something. You've still got yourself, even if you lose everything else. You've got to have faith in yourself and not get down just because you're on your own.

Being alone is very difficult.

All my concerts had no sounds in them they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

You may think I'm small, but I have a universe in my head.

My religion is to trust myself.

The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.

If a man wanted to put the entire universe in his breast, he couldn't do it with his chest stuck out.