Introspection Quotes

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

You can't lie to your soul.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."
[
The Minotaur
]

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.

Grover didn't say anything for awhile. Then, when I thought he was going to give me some deep philosophical comment to make me feel better, he said, "Can I have your apple?

We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy's fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure--your perfection--is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

The only journey is the one within.

When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points.

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."
[
Modernism's Patriarch
(
Time Magazine
, June 10, 1996)]

It's a fact—
everyone
is ignorant in some way or another.
Ignorance is our deepest secret.
And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don't know it or don't want to admit it.
Here is a quick test:
If you have
never
changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never
questioned
the basics, and if you have
no wish
to do so, then you are likely ignorant.
Before it is too late, go out there and find someone who,
in your opinion
, believes, assumes, or considers certain things very strongly and very differently from you, and just have a basic honest conversation.
It will do
both
of you good.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Sometimes, you have to look back in order to understand the things that lie ahead.

The most introspective of souls are often those that have been hurt the most.

A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time—the stuff of life.

The deeper I go into myself the more I realize that I am my own enemy.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.

My friend...care for your psyche...know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves" -Socrates

Think of your head as an unsafe neighborhood; don't go there alone.

I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.

One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

What is reading but silent conversation.

An accusing heart couldn't see her own sins.

The mind becomes much more beautiful,
when man could see his own weaknesses.

Spending time looking for what is missing in your life is futile; if you fail to look within yourself. When we challenge everything we believe we are, we reveal that which we never knew about our own selves.

Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.

Vintage books, old china, antiques; maybe I love old things so much because I feel impermanent myself.

Q: Why do I love thee, O Night?
A: Because you know I will never answer.

Even if you think you're doing well and have it all figured out, there is a voice you will always inevitably hear at some point which nags at you and says "but wait..." Don't ever dismiss it, listen to what it has to say. Life will never be close enough to perfect, and listening to that voice means stepping outside of yourself and considering your own wrongdoings and flaws.

A positive attitude is most easily arrived at through a deliberate and rational analysis of what’s required to manifest unwavering positive thought patterns. First, reflect on the actual, present condition of your mind. In other words, is the mind positive or not? We’ve all met individuals who perceive themselves as positive people but don’t appear as such. Since the mind is both invisible and intangible, it’s therefore easier to see the accurate characteristics of the mind through a person’s words, deeds, and posture.

For example, if we say, It’s absolutely freezing today! I’ll probably catch a cold before the end of the day! then our words expose a negative attitude. But if we say, The temperature is very cold (a simple statement of fact), then our expressions, and therefore attitude, are not negative. Sustaining an alert state in which self-awareness becomes possible gives us a chance to discover the origins of negativity. In doing so, we also have an opportunity to arrive at a state of positiveness, so that our words and deeds are also positive, making others feel comfortable, cheerful, and inspired.

Truth be told, the inward gaze is something she's not too fond of. But there are secrets that lurk in the mind, and she doesn't want any of them sneaking up on her. Sometimes it pays to take a deep look inside even if you get queasy gazing into those dark corners.

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

A creature that hides and withdraws into its shell, is preparing a way out. This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.

But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?

How shall I ever learn who I am when there is so much of me that belongs to someone else?

Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.

There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.

There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don’t see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren’t there.