Quotes About Introspection

People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concerned—we'd just make asses of ourselves.

I want to tell you about your heart-- you've probably been neglecting your heart-- and you don't know.

In my younger and more vulnerables years..

I did not faintly resemble a rose.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

If you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.

All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.

You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

People living alone get used to loneliness.

In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.

Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?

she knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think--or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

I know myself, he cried, but that is all.

I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

I've got an adjective that just fits you.

I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.