Quotes About Introspection

Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. —From Long Day's Journey into Night, by Eugene O'Neill

After a while the introvert develops strong extraversive needs; the man whose life has been governed exclusively by thinking craves in time the guide of feeling; the literal man searches eventually for ways of intuiting. So with the principal actors within the human character. Their rebellious understudies, if I may so designate them, are often of opposite persuasion.

I don't know why it should be, I am sure; but the sight of another man asleep in bed when I am up, maddens me.

I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid's knee. Why I have not got housemaid's knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

We need to ask God daily to search our hearts for sin that we cannot or will not see.

It's not enough to agree that we do tolerate at least some of them. Anyone except for the most self-righteous person will acknowledge that. "After all, no one is perfect," may be our attitude. But to honestly face those sins is another matter. For one thing, it is quite humbling. It also implies that we must do something about them. We can no longer continue to ignore them as we have in the past.

His moral purity serves to magnify our impurity.

Introspection can easily become the tool of Satan, who is called the "accuser" (Revelation 12:10).

Identification is why the reader reads and why the writer writes. We all want to identify with a character, so that we can, in turn, identify with ourselves. Do you have yourself all figured out? Is your self-knowledge so complete? Do you know yourself so well that you'll never do anyting stupid or make a fool of yourself again? When it comes to knowing ourselves, we are incomplete, lacking, deficient. Each of us is our own ongoing problem until the day we die.

I'm the kind of guy who can't keep a plant alive for a week, let alone a relationship.

It's really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There's a whole commotion going on inside us.

Sometimes I think life's nothin' but sittin' around watchin' pretty go bad.

Not for the first time, as the trip kicks in, I make a note to myself: Don't be an asshole.

The obvious question: Was it better to die now or go on living ashamed of the fact that you were still alive? Why wasn't that on the SATs? Compare and constrast.

When it's time for me to walk away from something, I walk away from it. My mind, my body, my conscience tell me that enough is enough.

Tylko ludzie o du?ej samo?wiadomo?ci potrafi? rozszyfrowa? i rozumie? innych. St?d pozorny paradoks: introwertycy w sposób bardzo czujny i ch?onny ani?eli typy ekstrawertyków otwarci s? na ludzi i ?wiat.

Dopóki cz?owiek nie musi siebie sprawdzi? w czynie, mo?e si? oszukiwa? bez ?adnych ogranicze?.

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

It mattered little if one was mute; people did not understand one another anyway. They collided with or charmed one another, hugged or trampled one another, but everyone knew only himself. His emotions, memory, and senses divided him from others as effectively as thick reeds screen the mainstream from the muddy bank. Like the mountain peaks around us, we looked at one another, separated by valleys, too high to stay unnoticed, too low to touch the heavens.

I was pushing myself to extremes in order to discover my many selves.

Here was one place where I could find out who I was and what I was going to become. And that was the public library.

Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life

The agony of having to share this small slice of world with big breakable humans who are really just uncovered beating hearts walking around spilling their viscera and their words everywhere, not bothering to clean up. Animals are a smooth punctuation to human parataxis, resisting our love out of modesty.