Quotes About Introspection

I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language.

part of trying to attract those poet-men was to look a little like I had wandered onto campus by accident after having spent ten years with the wolves behind some farmhouse, living off scraps and reveling in the pure air like a half–girl Mowgli, half–woman Thoreau.

I'd stopped waving to passengers in cars by then- I'd grown suspicious of people and all the complications of interior lives- so I sat and watched and rode and thought, and as soon as the bus doors opened, we all rolled out the doorand split apart like billiard balls.

Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world.

You are your own teacher. Looking for teachers can't solve your own doubts. Investigate yourself to find the truth - inside, not outside. Knowing yourself is most important.

The heart is the only book worth reading.

Inconspicuousness begins as self-protection but soon extends to self-reliance and a deeper appreciation of who we are and where we belong in things.

It has become routine to assume that the rewards of life are public and that our lives can be measured by how we are seen rather than what we do.

Submerged, I have become a refugee from the visible world.

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.

It's profoundly counter-intuitive for us to think of ourselves as mad. We seem so normal and mostly so good – to ourselves. It's everyone else who is out of step… And yet maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn't begun.

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

Our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.