Quotes About Introspection

The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.

You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem ...

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

My mind is so busy thinking about values that I don't have time to experience them.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.

Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift.

The silent bear no witness against themselves.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad?

He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.

The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.

It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and to find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than try to be a little kinder.

What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self? William Law

What fun would it be if one didn't have to think about happiness

What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning?

He acted as if he could detect in her face nothing but its external beauties of form and texture. Whereas, of course, flesh is never wholly opaque; the soul shows through the walls of its receptacle.

After all, what is an individual?