Quotes About Introspection

Like most people, Hamilton and Adams were preternaturally sensitive to flaws in the other that they themselves possessed.

Had Rockefeller not feared his own capacity for excess, he wouldn't have engaged in such strenuous introspection.

because we don't have to talk. Often we sit fifteen minutes in silence before one of us breaks it!

These intimate conversations with myself, I'm sure, had a great influence on my life. I was afraid I could not stand my prosperity, and tried to teach myself not to get puffed up with any foolish notions.

Perhaps if Rockefeller had made himself available at the beginning of his career as he now did at the end, he might not have been sitting in the witness stand.

perhaps he had so thoroughly rationalized his own behavior that he saw himself in the same glowing, virtuous light as his son did.

Unfortunately, once in that state of mind, he was all but deaf to criticism.

I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors. The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults or remove the prejudices which are imbibed against him.

Yet he was more vulnerable to criticism than he admitted.

As he ventured timidly beyond the self-contained world of his youth, he could not just enjoy spontaneous pleasure and had to justify it in terms of self-improvement.

In the end, we can only explain how he rationalized his behavior to himself and others; given the absence of revelatory letters or diaries, we can say little about the unconscious drives that led him to do this or the mental strains it might have caused.

He never seemed to take great pleasure in his accomplishments, and for the rest of his life, he craved a restful but elusive peace.

Washington grew as a leader because he engaged in searching self-criticism.

He is very well and jolly by bits but sometimes I see he feels as lonely as I do

I wish my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me;

self-referential semantic labyrinth.

Now I know that without mirrors we are different, we're not really the same...Maybe they had noticed us looking worriedly at other people's faces, as if we wee trying to see in them what we had become

Maybe it was Roumiya's beauty that drove me away, her silent beauty, her eyes that seemed to be looking through everythig and draining it of all meaning.

You spend way too much time confusing silence with strength.

I want to be alone. I don't want to be alone. My days pop like bubbles. There is no one to remember the things that have happened to me.

Why was it so hard to tell the difference between what you thought you wanted and what you wanted? Why did people have to be such a danger to themselves?

We both sat there mute, as if we were in a no-talking competition and serious about winning.

Reacher said nothing.

Don't go anywhere, don't do anything, don't call anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing something, which would contravene the don't do anything part of the command. But then, breathing was doing something, technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided that component of the order was purely rhetorical.