Quotes About Introspection

Writing, he'd come to see, was the spiritual disease of which it considered itself to be the cure;

I've shed my own skin and merged into the fog.

How poorly we communicate, even the most drastic messages, even to ourselves.

But you know who you are when you're on your own out there in all that emptiness. There's no past, no holding on to the scraps that are all you've got left. Everything is that minute, or maybe tomorrow, not yesterday.

How could a man know the truth of his own soul?

So much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have some bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts.

Why, in truth, sir, was Monte Cristo's reply, man is but an ugly caterpillar for him who studies him through a solar microscope; but you said, I think, that I had nothing else to do. Now, really, let me ask, sir, have you? — do you believe you have anything to do? or to speak in plain terms, do you really think that what you do deserves being called anything?

There is a sort of consolation at the contemplation of the yawning abyss, at the bottom of which lie darkness and obscurity. Edmond

Life isn't about finding the answers, life is about knowing there are always more questions.

Our spiritual journey is always a journey inward. The outward journey in life is just to show you yourself as reflected in the faces and places you visit.

What provokes readers to experience their own profound sense of self?

He has the self-conscious look of someone drinking alone who is trying not to appear self-conscious.

and that leaves me. And that leaves you.

I walk reciting every quiet word I know...

Humanness is a window thrown against a wall.

Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular.

What I have done is to draw and redraw my portrait in front of the backdrop of Japan. I have exemplified what Helen Mears devoted Japan, Mirror for Americans to. You look into this country and find yourself reflected. It is not a simple process. You can do this only if you describe the place as it is. Only then, through what you emphasize and what you do not, does your own form become visible. I am the empty places in my books.

it is often more difficult to remember to be mindful than to be mindful itself. (p. 47)

To be mindful of social phenomena is thus to identify more clearly hatred, greed, and delusion as well as the seeds of wisdom and compassion both around us and in us. (p. 52)

From his earliest years, Alfred Hitchcock was a loner and a watcher, an observer rather than a participant. "I don't remember ever having a playmate," he recalled as an adult. At family gatherings: "I would sit quietly in a corner, saying nothing. I looked and observed a great deal. I've always been that way and still am. I was anything but expansive. I was a loner—can't even remember having had a playmate. I played by myself, inventing my own games.

The asanas are useful maps to explore yourself, but they are not the territory.

Very simply, we set aside time and a quiet place to engage in inquiries that will remind us of who we really are. We do this practice as often as necessary for this understanding to become an implicit part of our being. For most of us this means practicing from the first breath to the last.

The happier people become the more I noticed my sadness.

I can't believe I'm thirty-one-years-old, lying on my back on a pier in broad daylight--in my own hometown, I might add--trying to figure out a place to go make out." "Is that what the kids are calling it these days?