Quotes About Introspection

I had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world; everything outside me became a dream; what I had understood till now became unintelligible.

To be alone: icy, iron terror, foretaste of the grave, forerunner of unpitying death. Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another's loneliness strange.

I think that one listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.

In the sweet light of love I realized, or believed I realized, that perhaps the inward self is the only self which really exists.

He is too sensitive to be happy, too haunted by all his irresolute, cautious, mistrusted feelings.

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls —Robert Walser. A German-speaking Swiss writer, Walser is understood to be the missing link between Kleist and Kafka. Confined to a sanatorium in Herisau, Switzerland, he used to write 'micrograms', (undecipherable short texts handwritten in a nano text-size) and take long walks. On the 25th of December 1956 he was found, dead of a heart attack, in a field of snow.

It's gradually becoming "serious," my situation, I realize this.

I already said loud and clear that today I'm apparently a little hmm hmm and la-di-da and okay a bit hoo-hoo and maybe also a little wee-oo wee-oo. Is that so terrible?

In the forest you pray involuntarily.

the conscious self doesn't create thoughts; it receives them.

The sages may have been self-serving, like the rest of us, but that doesn't mean they weren't sages.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it.

we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

Being alone makes us stronger. That's the honest truth. But it's cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

We must ask ourselves: what should we demand of ourselves, given the imperfections of politics and the disappointments of history.

Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you.

If you cling frantically to the good, how are you to find out what the good really is?

The only people who make any sense in the world are those who know that whatever happens to them has its roots in what they are.

I had schooled myself since the war-days never to speak of my enthusiasms; when other people did not share them, which was usual, I was hurt and my pleasure diminished; why was I always excited about things other people did not care about? But I could not hold in.

Forgive yourself for being a human creature, Ramezay. That is the beginning of wisdom; that is part of what is meant by the fear of God; and for you it is the only way to save your sanity. Begin now, or you will end up with your saint in the madhouse.

You are still young enough to think that torment of the spirit is a splendid thing, a sign of a superior nature. But you are no longer a young man; you are a youngish middle aged man, and it is time you found out that these spiritual athletics do not lead to wisdom.