Quotes About Introspection

Harriet was silent, thinking, and then she said, It is too hard to be a person. You don't only have to go on and on. You have to be-- she looked for the word she needed and could not find it. Then, You have to be tall as well, said Harriet.

my blue eyes peering into their brown eyes and seeing there some essential part of myself, some irreducible aspect of my being, which in turn gave them back the same reflected version of themselves

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

Since my adolescence I have read two and sometimes three newspapers a day, frequently clipping an article that for obscure and soon forgotten reasons attracts me. I usually toss the clippings into a desk drawer, and later, often years later, I'll find myself reading through the clippings, throwing most of them out. It fills me with a strange sadness, a kind of grief for my lost self, as if I were reading and throwing out old diaries.

Anyone with a lifelong guilty conscience is likely to be a hair-splitting moralist, especially when it comes to other people's behavior.

By this evening," he declared, "we will all know who we are and what we're doing here!

The unexamined life is not worth living'...Socrates made provocative remarks like this famous one as part of his daily practice in Athens in the late fourth century B.C. When he made these statements, he was invariably exhorting his fellow Greeks to avoid falling into the trap of what we might call 'ethical complacency,' the point at which an individual ceases trying to become a better person.

The race of man haunted by the thought of what it used to be, ashamed of what they are, afraid of what they were.

How was I to be a scientist, father Lion?' Science is knowing. What could I have known? Others always did the knowing, knew what was in me, what should come out of me, what was best for me. I didn't know who I was, what I wanted. I know less now, and I am afraid.

I stil aint qwite said how it wer. Not like a diffrent country. It wer mor like I wer behynt the back clof in a show. Thats how it wer. Thru the clof I cud see the other figgers moving I cud see the peopl watching only no 1 cud see me. If I wer a figger in a show what hand wer moving me then? I cudnt be bothert to think on that right then. Theres all ways some thingwl be moving you if it aint 1 thing its a nother you cant help that.

We do not see the lens through which we look.

Ruso, perched on the edge of Gnostus's operating table, looked the stringy youth up and down and wondered if young men were getting stupider or whether he had been just as much of a fool at that age.

Does every young woman, she wondered, discover herself through the eyes of the men who love her?

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.

she turned to the first page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people's business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this feeling.

She can hear the crazy thoughts that are going through your mind before you can even find them.

I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I'd ever seen or felt before.

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader's recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.

I was deep inside my mind, which is where I go when things get too intense.

Although he claimed not to understand matters of human conscience, it was precisely his own conscience that led him to question the status quo, and which would cost

When a breeze blew, petals rained down on my upturned face, and I stopped and gasped, stunned by the beauty and sadness.

My last thoughts, measured out in drops of ink.

They were all overachievers with exploding heads, and this was not a good thing . . . or was it?