Quotes About Introspection

Knowing, loving, and respecting yourself is an absolute prerequisite to knowing, loving, and respecting someone else.

When problems arise, a good question to ask yourself is "What am I hoping to get out of this situation?

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

Not saying everything you think isn't about choosing to allow your body language to do the talking instead of speaking your thoughts aloud. It's about refraining from both! Keeping quiet and still.

Every bit of software wants you to be "social." What ever happened to being grumpy and alone in your writer's fugue?

Cocaine is also the drug of success and ambition, a tonic to those for whom doubt and introspection serve no purpose. No accident that it replaced psychedelics in the Woodstock Generation's stash boxes as flower children turned into young professionals.

If I wasn't such a bad woman on the page, I couldn't be such a good woman in life.

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.

Besides, back to the subject of you being nuts, all writers are nuts, didn't you know that?

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?

In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don't know why, and if we do find out why, it's decades later and knowing why doesn't matter any more.

Battle not with monsters, Lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, The abyss gazes back into you." —Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher

Flailing blindly in the abyss of her own thoughts, almost panicking as she went around and around in circles, unable to force a connection, drowning with no sign of a single buoy to grasp onto.

Oh Lord, it's hard to be humble, When you're perfect in every way. I can't wait to look in the mirror, Cause I get better looking each day. To know me is to love me. I must be a hell of a man. Oh Lord it's hard to be humble, But I'm doing the best that I can.

In each of us there is another whom we do not know." —Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology