Quotes About Introspection

There are those nights wehn you're pushing thirty and life seems over. When you feel like you'll never tie up any ends and no one iwll ever kiss your lips again.

Now I have something to tell you, her brother said. Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people, something of genuine social concern, I've been like a man who steps outside the theater before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat and play.

Whether you look at no men at all, or look at every single one - it comes to the same thing. You can throw yourself at their hearts, because you've gone mad from being always a stranger; from not being able to understand how you can even bear to hold their hands in your own any longer than you have to.

At last Hyacinth asked rather mournfully: Why do you keep on pushing me away? The note of unhappiness in that voice quite shocked him. How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.

The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now the right-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else; and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a wide semi-circle: alone.

Er fühlte einen unsäglichen Widerwillen, mit diesen Resten seiner selbst in Berührung zu kommen.

Eine große Erkenntnis vollzieht sich nur zur Hälfte im Lichtkreise des Gehirns, zur anderen Hälfte in dem dunklen Boden des Innersten, und sie ist vor allem ein Seelenzustand, auf dessen äußerster Spitze der Gedanke nur wie eine Blüte sitzt.

Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary.

And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.

The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.

for one knows little of oneself unless one has someone else in whom one is reflected. And since what one knows is really nothing, might it not be that at times he wished Tonka dead so that this intolerable existence might be over and done with?

Sie las in ihrem Leiden viel und entdeckte, daß ihr etwas verlorengegangen war, von dessen Besitz sie vordem nicht viel gewußt hatte: eine Seele. Was ist das? – Es ist negativ leicht bestimmt: es ist eben das, was sich verkriecht, wenn man von algebraischen Reihen hört.

Ulrich] richtete sich auf den Trümmern seiner Kindheit nicht ohne Schwierigkeiten ein, doch auch mit ein wenig angenehmen Gefühls, das wie Nebel aus diesem Boden aufstieg.

Vielleicht ist es ein Fehler, daß wir uns nicht erst als Greise kennen gelernt haben« sagte sie zu sich selbst und hatte die schwermütige Vorstellung zweier Nebelbänke, die am Abend zur Erde sinken. »Sie sind nicht so schön wie der strahlende Mittag,« dachte sie »aber was kümmert es diese zwei formlosen Grauen, wie die Menschen sie empfinden! Ihre Stunde ist gekommen und sie ist so weich wie die glühendste Stunde!«

A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings.

They should not be turned in upon ourselves but upwards and outwards.

We don't have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.

Progress would be wonderful — if only it would stop.

At this point he quit, right in the middle of an important and promising piece of work. He now saw his colleagues partly as relentless, obsessive public prosecutors and security chiefs of logic, and partly as opium eaters, addicts of some strange pale drug that filled their world with visions of numbers and abstract relations. God help me, he thought, surely I never could have meant to spend all my life as a mathematician?

Whoever cannot say "Yes" to life should at least utter the "No" of the saint.

Ein Mann, der die Wahrheit will, wird Gelehrter; ein Mann, der seine Subjektivität spielen lassen will, wird vielleicht Schriftsteller; was aber soll ein Mann tun, der etwas will, das dazwischen liegt?

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness

a face more suited for making book than selling books.