Quotes About Introspection

If we do not put effort into creating our original thoughts, then ready-made pseudo-thoughts, trite words and phrases, come automatically to mind and carry us along with them, resulting in "thinking almost entirely without thoughts." (Steiner).

No. I've seen enough brains to last

What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask." —Sam Keen

we secretly enjoy rush hour; drive-time is the only time most of us are ever alone.

For while it's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also the case that the unlived life isn't worth examining.

Second, once inside this alien world, we find ourselves. Deep within these characters and their conflicts we discover our own humanity.

while it's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also true that the unlived life isn't worth examining.

I had the time to reflect on my life.

You'd best change your point of view. Stop blaming me and thinking I'm the problem. If you think I'm the problem, then you have to change me. If you realize that you're the problem, then you can change yourself, learn something, and grow wiser. Most people want everyone else in the world to change but themselves. Let me tell you, it's easier to change yourself than everyone else.

I was soon bored, and my mind would drift.

It is true that your world is only a mirror of you.

Twain broke with the tradition of asking "Who Am I?" and its species-wide variant "Who Is Man?" on the grounds that a "who-question" is a leading question. It predisposes us to expect the answer to be a sentient being, not unlike ourselves, "whom" we're trying to characterize.

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent Of everything you think, And of everything you do, Is for yourself — And there isn't one. – Wei Wu Wei

them. Thoughts were

I feel how little it concerns me, everything that's called the world, and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.

I was, I remember, nineteen years old, wrote poems, still wore no proper collar, ran out in the rain and snow, always woke up early in the morning, read Lenau, considered an overcoat a superfluous item, received a monthly salary of one hundred twenty-five francs and didn't know what to do with all that money.

I imagine that it would be unspeakably lovely to die with the terrible knowledge that I have offended whosoever I love the most and have filled them with bad opinions of me.

On the whole I consider the constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding.

Debería estar completamente solo en este mundo, yo, Steiner, sin ninguna otra criatura. Sin sol, sin cultura. Yo, desnudo sobre una gran piedra sin tormentas, sin nieve, sin bancos, sin dinero, sin tiempo y sin respiración. Entonces, por fin, dejaría de tener miedo.

One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.

The best-trained part of us, though, is the mouth, it ?is always obediently and devoutly shut. And it's only too true: an open mouth is a yawning fact, the fact that its owner is dwelling with his few thoughts in some other place than the domain and pleasure-garden of attentiveness.

My life till now seems to have been fairly empty, and the certainty that it will remain empty gives a feeling of endlessness, a feeling which tells one to go to sleep, and to do only the most unavoidable things.

Let us see to it that ponderers, thinkers, feelers survive in our midst.

Failure's sleeve cannot help but brush against the back of gratified desires and insatiability is inevitably left to gaze with smoldering eyes into the wise, peaceful eyes of a person who finds satiation within himself.