Quotes About Introspection

Another week passes into grey oblivion. You're a slow dream, an autumn freeze, a ship on the doldrums. Thoughts come slow and ponderous, like deep sea fish floating heavy and memory-bound to the surface; coelacanth reborn.

Once, we were close and close-knit, but now we are unmoored islands, each alone, each a separate planet, drifting farther and farther away, content to turn ever inward . . . This is no idle solipsism; it has taken on the fragile brightness of truth. Cities turned from cities, self-devouring. Governments fragmenting into fragments of fragments. Entertainment become a solitary diversion. Solo adventures.

Are you laughing at me?" "No," he said. "No, I'm not. You're a curious person. You ask questions. That's why they don't like you. That's all." People who asked questions didn't necessarily like being asked questions. "What's wrong with asking questions?" "Nothing." Everything. Once the questions snuck in, whatever had been certain became uncertain. Questions opened the way for doubt.

Once the questions snuck in, whatever had been certain became uncertain. Questions opened the way for doubt.

That took less hubris than thinking this was a message from on high.

And me still not seeing, and the brightness coiled within me assumed an almost hushed quality, as if we were in a cathedral.

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye but not notice the log in your own eye?

Se não tenho respostas verdadeiras é porque ainda não sabemos que perguntas devemos fazer. Nossos instrumentos são inúteis; nossa metodologia, defeituosa; nossas motivações, egoístas.

Time for another drink, somewhere else. A kind of oblivion.

Now he wondered why he'd bothered. He disliked having such thoughts because he wasn't above it all—he was in it—but they were hard to suppress.

I did not feel as if I were a person but simply a receiving station for a series of transmissions.

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don't know if I accept everything even now. I don't know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there's defiance in that, too.

If I went rummaging through your carcass, would I find you?

What can you do when your five senses are not enough?

Take Time To Think

Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, / He who travels fastest who travels alone...

I find I don't learn a lot while I'm talking

There are defining moments in one's life when you learn about yourself, and you deposit that knowledge in the experience account, so you can draw on it at some later date.

I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.

My history has been that of a soul struggling into the conviction of its own existence. —FREDERIC MYERS, Fragments of Inner Life

Spare a thought for the poor introverts among us. In a world of party animals and glad-handers, they're the ones who stand by the punch bowl. In a world of mixers and pub crawls, they prefer to stay home with a book. Everywhere around them, cell phones ring and e-mails chime and they just want a little quiet.

Since attention is generally considered an internally generated state, it seems that neuroscience has tiptoed up to a conclusion that would be right at home in the canon of some of the Eastern philosophies: introspection, willed attention, subjective state—pick your favorite description of an internal mental state—can redraw the contours of the mind, and in so doing can rewire the circuits of the brain, for it is attention that makes neuroplasticity possible.