Quotes About Introspection

The crucial task of old age is balance: keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being.

I was suddenly really famous, and I didn't know how to cope. I didn't know myself well enough as a person, number one, and as an actor, number two. I wanted to escape.

I don't think I think things through like regular people would. I could be a real hateful person, and I also don't really care about my own well-being, I guess. I just kind of have that knack about me. I just don't care.

Being a musician and artist can feel superficial at times - you talk about yourself every day and pose for photos for the magazines and newspapers, and it can be very tiring for your well-being.

You act in different ways for your own personal well-being, and you don't think about the people you hurt along the way. wish I would have thought about it.

I thought divorce was for people that threw plates at each other, and I'd have to be an alcoholic or having affairs. But the truth is, sometimes a very sweet, well-meaning person just doesn't do it for you, and you need to get out of there.

Though I still have no semblance of a life outside of Nine Inch Nails at the moment, I realize my goals have gone from getting a record deal or selling another record to being a better person, more well-rounded, having friends, having a relationship with somebody.

Introversion, when embraced, is a wellspring of riches. It took me years to acknowledge this simple reality, to claim my home, and to value all it offers.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.

I love to get to the underbelly of why people are up in arms about anything. Really, what I see is a big shadow in the West, in America especially, and everyone's afraid of looking stupid. But the truth is, I'm a genius and I'm stupid at the same time.

Many scientists have been drawn to Buddhism out of a sense that the Western tradition has delivered an impoverished conception of basic, human sanity. In the West, if you speak to yourself out loud all day long, you are considered crazy. But speaking to yourself silently - thinking incessantly - is considered perfectly normal.

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.

I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers.

At the beginning, I experienced writing as a sort of constraint. Starting so young as a writer is pitiable: it's beyond your powers; you have to lay bare things that are very heavy, and you don't have the means for that.

Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.

Foundational autonomy asserts instead that in the most fundamental practical sense, I am my own creator, which means that at the core, I am alone.

The practice of meditation can reveal to you more of your mental capacity.

I made records for 20 years, I lived off it. But people would say I made so many mistakes, I did so many things you're not supposed to do. I had a band name nobody could say. I didn't play live. I never practiced, I never got better at my instrument.

There's always an opportunity with crisis. Just as it forces an individual to look inside himself, it forces a company to reexamine its policies and practices.

I think you have to be pragmatic to the approach of life and brutally honest with yourself. We all are here to do something, and it is important to understand our potential first.

I'll never praise myself, because I think there's always improvement to be made.

Neither blame or praise yourself.

I try hard to always question myself and wonder, 'What could I have done better? What did I do wrong?' The culture at our company is to be self-critical, but you have to balance that as a leader with praise for your team.