Quotes About Introspection

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

Jesus, she said. -Are you in there at all? -I am, Annie, I told her. -Bursting to get out.

Why the loft? Why only there, and only then? Now Ã¢â'¬â€œ today Ã¢â'¬â€œ I think it was because I was happy. I didn't think that then. I couldn't have. I didn't know I was happy and I didn't know that happiness was finite.

It seems the soul retreats into itself and smiles at the powers of the senses. And so both the inside and the outside of man are full of weakness and falsehood.

They view painful situations as accidents, bad luck, or something that was done to them. But many of the problems we face in life are not accidents. Most of the time our problems are ones we bring on ourselves

Perhaps it is the nature of man not to wish to know too much about his own nature.

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its "self-help" section: "For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history, and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am more content with questions than answers.

Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

Everyday, I think about dying. About disease, starvation, violence, terrorism, war, the end of the world. It helps keep my mind off things.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.

anamnesis: the bringing to consciousness of forgotten things.

In a sense you are always more clearly aware than I can be of what I am in the world; and when I confront my own face, there may be a moment of fear, as I try to fit the person whom I know so well to this thing that others know better

This is how Kant explains the moral motive. When I ask myself not what I want to do, but what I ought to do, then I stand back from myself, and put myself in the position of an impartial judge.

I'm very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I am a liar.

It was my turn to be silent while a small family of moments crossed my path, single file, from the left, sticking their tongues out at me.

Are you going to do it? he asked. Maybe, I said. Don't 'maybe' me, baby. It's written all over you. I'd almost be willing to go along, you know. Of all my relations, I like sex the best and Eric the least. I lit a cigarette, while I considered.

I have always found that hell is other people.

I was not always that way, but perhaps the shadow Earth, where I spent so many years, mellowed me a bit, and maybe my hitch in the dungeons of Amber reminded me somewhat of the quality of human suffering. I do not know. I only know that I could not pass by the hurt I saw on the form of someone much like someone who had once been a friend.

Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck.

it is because I am a man who occasionally aspires to things beyond the belly and the phallus.

The thing had been quite unpremeditated on my part. I had not even thought of her as a woman until she came into my arms and revised my thinking on the subject.