Quotes About Introspection

I didn't hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth.

Most people are so occupied by the external world that they don't realize that there is a very rich world within themselves. In this stage, we relax, let go, and learn to appreciate that we have an internal universe.

His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.

Old boy, said Grimes, you're in love. Nonsense! Smitten? said Grimes. No, no. The tender passion? No. Cupid's jolly little darts? No. Spring fancies, love's young dream? Nonsense! Not even a quickening of the pulse? No. A sweet despair? Certainly not. A trembling hope? No. A frisson ? a Je ne sais quoi ? Nothing of the sort. Liar! said Grimes.

Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.

Do you want to change? It's the only evidence of life.

So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.

Outside the windows the cars swept past continuously, out of town, into town, lights ablaze, radios at full throttle. "I wither slowly in thine arms," he read. "Here at the quiet limit of the world," and repeated to himself: "Here at the quiet limit of the world. Here at the quiet limit of the world"… as a monk will repeat a simple pregnant text, over and over again in prayer.

Tead, kui ma vaatan seda oma suurt kinniseotud jalga, siis ma ei saa lahti tundest, et mul on podagra, ja see tekitab hirmsat ?šampuseisu.

I always maintain a certain privacy on the sea. One so easily forms acquaintances which become tedious later.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

All this I learned about Julia, bit by bit, from the stories she told, from guesswork, knowing her, from what her friends said, from the odd expressions she now and then let slip, from occasional dreamy monologues of reminiscences; I learnt it as one does learn the former — as it seems at the time, the preparatory — life of a woman one loves, so that one thinks of oneself as part of it, directing it by devious ways, towards oneself.

How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long summer days of unreflecting dissipation.

It was during that term that I began to realise that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense to myself. I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enchant it; Sebastian drank to escape.

Quando la gente odia con tanta foga, vuol dire che odia qualcosa che ha dentro di sé.

I do not seek to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the Tatler, I have not come to exhibit myself.

When it was done, Guy studied himself once more in the glass and recognized an old acquaintance he could never cut, to whom he could never hope to give the slip for long, the uncongenial fellow traveler who would accompany him through life.

Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.

the room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind

Everyone suspects themselves of at least one of the cardinal virtues...

Her life was the significant pause between two glances in a mirror. ( paraphrased from The Beautiful and Damned)

Aren't you interested in anything except yourself? Not much.

This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people who through natural clarity or disillusion left the enclosure and sought the labyrinth.