Quotes About Introspection

By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell

It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with, we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others...Being closely observed by a companion can inhibit us from observing others; we become taken up with adjusting ourselves to the companion's questions and remarks, we have to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.

He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with.

Loneliness is a tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere,' remarked Elias Canetti, suggesting how effortlessly and yet how uselessly we can find fault with others.

We should forever forswear the masochistic process wherein we seek another's approval before we have even asked ourselves whether that person's views deserve to be listened to.

We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.

A few centuries from now, the level of self-knowledge that our own age judges necessary to get married might be thought puzzling, if not outright barbaric. By then, a standard, wholly non-judgemental line of enquiry (appropriate even on a first date), to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and non-defensive answer, would simply be: 'So in what ways are you mad?' Kirsten

A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It

A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination.

The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. Rather than trying to cut ourselves in two, we should cease waging civil war on our perplexing physical envelopes and learn to accept them as unalterable facts of our condition; neither so terrible, nor so humiliating.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...

Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society's expectations

It seemed an advantage to be travelling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with, we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape.

A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one, a silence with an attractive one leaves you certain it is you who are impossibly dull.

We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal

Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

The sulker is a complicated creature, giving off messages of deep ambivalence, crying out for help and attention, while at the same time rejecting it should it be offered, wanting to be understood without needing to speak.