Quotes About Introspection

Yaln?z benim (renkli ve gösteriÅŸli olmas?na raÄŸmen) pek uzun say?lamayacak hayat?m?n sonunda, çivileyip asacak tezlerim taze bitti. Hayat da çarm?ha çivilenmekten pek farkl? deÄŸil zaten.

Physician heal thyself.

Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business. We should have avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. But too late. Can't be helped. What can't be cured must be endured.

Why even try to understand the human condition if humanity revealed itself as grotesque, dark, not worth it.

My diaries have always been my friends. The written word is so much more constant than human beings.

We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.

It was curious that so avowedly godless a person should keep trying to write about faith.

because the trouble with trying to escape yourself is that you bring yourself along for the ride.

She had turned away from her sexuality, her instincts having warned her that to do otherwise might be to be absorbed by it; that it was for her, would always be, a big subject, a whole dark continent to map, and she wasn't prepared to go that way, be that explorer, chart those shores: not any more, or, maybe, not yet.

When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left.

other people (the rocks on which we break ourselves and founder), and on the other, of the darkness circling within ourselves (which sucks us down, and we drown).

How deeply could she have cared for me if she could dive so swiftly into the next things? How real had it been? Such thoughts plagued me, though I knew, in my deepest heart, that this was me trying to shift the blame, and the blame could not be shifted, it rested firmly on my shoulders.—So this was

he perceived that this memory-jumbled rag-bag of material was in fact the very heart of her, her self-portrait, the way she looked in the mirror when nobody else was in the room...

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence:

The first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

All novelists know that crisis reveals character.

if human nature were not a mystery, we'd have no need of poets.

On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one's own advice.

A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write.

We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.

If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process.

Merely accepting that we are lazy, distracted, petty, easily provoked to anger, and inclined to waste our time in ways that we will later regret is not a path to happiness.

There is now little question that how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.