Quotes About Introspection

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.

I'm losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.

I Know, I Alone I know, I alone How much it hurts, this heart With no faith nor law Nor melody nor thought. Only I, only I And none of this can I say Because feeling is like the sky - Seen, nothing in it to see.

But my sadness is comforting Because it's right and natural And because it's what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hand pick flowers And the soul takes no notice.

I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

Se te é impossível viver só, nasceste escravo.

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.

Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? What is this space between myself and myself?

And I have the others in me. Even when I'm far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I'm all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don't even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn't mine: it's me.

As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don't know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).

I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.

Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.