Quotes About Introspection

You can appreciate things at four in the morning that would go right past you during the day.

In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time. Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase.

Wise criticism always begins with self-criticism.

It is useless endeavor to fight the ego in the open; like a wounded hydra, it produces two heads for every one cut off. We must not indulge in self-scrutinization; we must not concentrate upon the problem of egocentricity. The way to purify the self is to avoid dwelling upon the self and to concentrate upon the task.

We may assume it is God we care for, but it may be our own ego we are concerned with. To examine our religious existence is, therefore, a task to be performed constantly.

I have come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason, I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.

Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.

I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.

Avoid popularity if you would have peace

Quando faccio bene mi sento bene. Quando faccio male mi sento male. Questa è la mia religione.

He had no need to push the everyday world away from him. He just stepped out of it whenever he wished.

If one is not a human being, what is one?

compassion, skepticism, and uncertainty rather than on dogma

We pursued the muses, instead of the mirrors.

Quote by Robert, a garçon who accepted a 'fat envelope' to leave the Balzar: Anyway it is only in moments of crisis that we find lucidity about ourselves—though only after the crisis is over. Still, that's enough lucidity for anyone. Anyway, it is all the lucidity that life will give you. The crucial thing is that is was _our choice._ We made it. We _chose_ to leave.

Iliad's subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be.

Pause for a moment and a place will pool out around you, not as an illusion but as a fact, in details it would not have had if you had not stopped to look.

Things were pretty cold-blooded back in Rockdale. That's when my arms were so pretty I could hold them up to the light and see the veins curling all clean and smooth like little blue branches.

Man, that's the only kind of book I like – one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.

You can do terrible things when you don't know who you are...

a man within the breast...

The thing about you, her mother used to say, is that you never act out of character. You have no originality. But Nigora knew this was not true. Because she was going to act out of character, She was going (thought Nigora) to be herself. And yet: how could she? How could she?

Though life has to be lived forward, it can only be understood backward.

It only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth. Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights