Quotes About Introspection

Does he repent him or is there only room for his fear?

the great theme of the private journal in the 20th century is sickness.

Because I had gone through the same thing. I had tasted the darkness." "You'd 'tasted the darkness', had you?" "I'm allowed to have some poetry in my life, Valkyrie." "'Tasted the darkness, I swear to God... What, did you have a darkness sandwich, or was it a whole plate? What did you have for dessert? Was it pretentiousness? Did you have a bowl of pretentiousness for dessert?

Remember, when you're reading your Bible, your Bible is also reading you." It is a two-way transaction.

I looked at this man. He was in his fifites, mostly bones inside hisblack suit, and gave off an odour, if you were as close up to him as I was, of a long-closed keyboard opened suddenly in an empty house. (73)

Initially [my favorite books] seem to immerse me in another life, but ultimately they immerse me in me; I am looking through the window into another person's home, but it is my face that I see in the reflection.

What are men? Children who doubt.

Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

I shall unlearn feeling, unlearn my gift. That is greater and harder than what passes there for life.

and he suddenly opened his eyes and stared straight ahead into an empty space till slowly we returned into view. I can make small talk, he said slowly, I can do that but out of the corner of my eye I can see the dark approaching.

We might never rid ourselves of a lingering anxiety regarding our death; this is a kind of tax we pay in return for self-awareness.

1. If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.8

To grow up is to endure the equivocal, to permit the ambiguous.

WE GENERALLY FEEL defined by our past. Our past, however, is a story that we tell ourselves in the present.

Believe in yourself, blame yourself

My normal, regrettable practice of minimal eye contact and uncharitable pigeonholing is suspended in favor of a real fascination with everything human.

A final piece of advice: recognise and beware the toxic blend of low self-esteem and grandiose self-regard known only to the truly damned.

There are three things I noticed about being thirty-three: Failing memory, hair loss and failing memory.

We all get stuck in our belief systems, however sensible we think they are. To me, the New Age community is particularly guilty of not testing or challenging what it claims.

A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer.

Because reason...is the only thing that makes us men, and distinguishes us from the beasts, I would prefer to believe that it exists, in its entirety, in each of us...

My third maxim was to try always to master myself rather than fortune and change my desires rather than changing how things stand in the world.

He who lives well lives well hidden.

I undertook to conquer myself rather than fortune , and to alter my desires rather than change the order of the world , and to accustom myself to believe that nothing is entirely in our power except our own thoughts .