Quotes About Introspection

Andrew Roberts

No man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and wither he is going. – Napoleon

The human heart is an abyss that is impossible to predict; the most piercing looks cannot gauge it.'41

Always alone and in the midst of men, I come back to my rooms to dream with myself, and to surrender myself to all the vivacity of my melancholy,' he wrote.

I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends . . . These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth.

It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or do in a circumstance unexpected by other people: it is reflection, meditation.

I'd always thought "die" would have more symmetry in the last line, but when I'd brought it up to my parents, they'd accused me of being needlessly fatalistic.

I contemplated the consequences of pushing myself, it put me into a state of panic that no degree of conscious knowledge could counter. The

If I could pray--and I'd stopped doing that nonsense long before the miracle of the refrigerator--I imagined praying, but I didn't know who to direct it to.

And never farting pointed to guilt in the courthouse of my mind.

Because, in an empty bedroom with creaky old wood floors, it is a natural human response to just stand there and shift your weight from foot to foot, and think about sex.

I think everyone's an arrow like that, too, aiming into their own centers.

I said a silent prayer. Actually, silent is probably the only type of prayer a guy should attempt when his head's in a toilet.

It's no wonder I became a monster, too.

I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn't lead, their jobs I couldn't do - overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.

Even if it's deep unhappiness, it's your unhappiness.

And if you're going to go through your life and you have to associate with people, what you want to do is find egotistical people. Find out if they have a reason to justify their egos. if they can't, then get rid of them. If they do, then hang around them, because you might actually learn something.

The past five months of loafing had demoralized him, the underside of his creativity being a destructiveness which tore at himself and others. 'I should like to sit down with [half] dozen chosen companions,' he wrote Perkins, 'and drink myself to death but I am sick alike of life, liquor and literature.

There is more learning in the question itself than the answer.

When it's all over, you'll realize that the answer is already within you.

Because I've overcome the vanity and pride of being different. I've understood that they are a pitiful defense against being different. Because I've understood that the sun shines differently when something changes, but I'm not the axis of those changes.

It's as though a cabbage tried to investigate the causes and effects of its existence

I lose a great deal of my charm when one gets to know me better.