Quotes About Introspection

We reproach people for talking about themselves but it is the subject they treat best.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.

He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and his pretension itself is a very great prejudice.

Je tiens à mon imperfection comme à ma raison d'être.

C'est dans l'absolue ignorance de notre raison d'être qu'est la racine de notre tristesse et de nos dégoûts.

Whatever one may do, one is always alone in the world. That is what he wishes to say. He is right. You may always explain: you never are understood.

That is what is most lacking in our people," she said, "they do not think.

Like mirror script, to read requires reflection, asks us to see ourselves holding the page.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.

Le coeur humain, beau comme un sismographe.

Vous ne pourrez jamais voir cette étoile comme je la voyais. Vous ne comprenez pas : elle est comme le cÅ"ur d'une fleur sans cÅ"ur.

Sur le point de m'en aller, je veux lui poser une question qui résume toutes les autres, une question qu'il n'y a que moi pour poser, sans doute: "Qui êtes-vous?" Et elle, sans hésiter: "Je suis l'âme errante.

Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?

Je préfère, encore une fois, marcher dans la nuit à me croire celui qui marche dans le jour.

It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognized itself.

I will be like Nijinksi, who was taken last year to the Russian ballet, and could not comprehend what spectacle he was viewing. I will be alone, quite alone in myself, indifferent to all the world's ballets.

Hacía mucho tiempo que yo había dejado de entenderme con Nadja. Lo cierto es que quizás nunca nos hemos entendido, al menos acerca de la manera deafrontar las cosas sencillas de la existencia.

I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call; where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.

Who are you?" And she, without a moment's hesitation. "I am the soul in limbo.

I strive in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate.

Perhaps] I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I've forgotten.

I knew everything, so hard have I tried to read in my streams of tears.

Who goes there? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?