Quotes About Introspection

Meditation, especially for people who don't know very much about it and think it's this very hippy dippy thing, can really be powerful, terrifying even, as it lifts the rug up on your subconscious and the dust comes flying out.

It's true, I had an extremely delicious life, but that was my life at home, and perhaps because I was only a child, or for whatever reasons, I found the company of others, especially other boys, quite terrifying and upsetting.

It's a terrifying thing to be perhaps 16 or 17 and feel like you are a failure and a has-been.

As people, right now, we're so over-stimulated in this world that I don't know what I'd do in Wyoming. I really don't know what I'd do. I would probably have a heart attack because I'd be so lonely, and I'd actually have to listen to myself think. That's a terrifying prospect for myself, and I'm sure many other people as well.

The truth is you only have yourself to offer. And when you come to that realization, it's terrifying, because you think it's probably not enough.

I want to let all men and women know: Try going to a party or a dinner where you're completely fine with silences, and you don't fill them just to fill them. It's exhilarating and terrifying.

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.

No one wants to be picked at. At the end of the day, we're all human beings with feelings and emotions. Nobody wants to be critiqued and picked apart, but it's the nature of the business. It comes with the territory. For me, if they're not talking about you, that's where you can run into some trouble.

I needed my own territory, and I didn't know how I was going to get it. And so I took my frustrations and plugged them into someone entirely different from me. I wanted to see if I could slip into someone else's skin.

It's better to go to one place and stay put and see it than run around a lot of territory and see nothing.

Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion.

What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terror.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.

It's weird to take your work into a room and everybody reads it. Then comes the terror part, the dissection.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

At the end, the key thing is you've got to live with yourself. That's the real test. Everything else is fleeting.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

I have a certain temperament, a disposition that I think lends itself to not playing outside the lines that much. But I do test the boundaries, certainly, and break one or two of my own. Some people are mystified by it, but not me.

This is a do-it-yourself test for paranoia: you know you've got it when you can't think of anything that's your fault.

I've learned that to expose yourself, to reveal yourself is a test of your humanness.

I think I've failed every test I've ever taken. If there was a failure I would have been it.

Lincoln had no such person that he could talk with. Often, as a result, he debated with himself, and he would draw up a kind of list of the pros and cons of an argument, and carefully figure them out, and he might test them in public.

They don't teach you just how to be in school. There's no class on that. There's no multiple choice test for Why Do I Feel This Way?

In my relations with my father, which are difficult and where I'm often met by coolness and indifference, I am constantly tempted to be cold and indifferent. Yet I know that this is a test if I could take it rightly.