Quotes About Introspection

unexplained pauses

treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself.

When things are easy a person doesn't really learn about himself. It's what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is. Some people never get that moment.

Summer nights held a special kind of loneliness that gave rise to strange imaginings. One walked the beach alone and thought too much.

I mean, we're all trying to find out who the hell we are, aren't we?

Whenever you're in a stress situation yourself—and there's time, of course—do exactly as you would do when you project yourself into one you're observing. Let your mind fall free, let whatever thoughts and images that surface come cleanly. Try not to exercise any mental discipline. Be a sponge; concentrate on everything and nothing. Specifics may come to you, certain repressed conduits electrically prodded into functioning.

If there was such a life and he could accept it without the terrible labyrinth from which he could find no escape. But it was more than that. In a manmade labyrinth one kept moving, running, careening off walls, the contact itself a form of progress, if only blind. His personal labyrinth had no walls, no defined corridors through which to race.

martinis, steak, and red wine, a proven formula for deep thinking

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes much sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.

Dad? What? A small bird rises from a tree in front of us. What should I be when I grow up? The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. Honest, I finally say.

First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outwards from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.

My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all.

When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.

To reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic inquiry.

not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that's why I talk so much.

Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time.

I turn my head from side to side.

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth.

I spit on my glove tips, touch it and can see the sizzle. Not good.