Best 61 quotes in «introspective quotes» category

If you get into introspective blues or something where you're stretching out a bit, large audiences don't respond to this, so you have to give them what they want, basically.

If there is one thing to do, it is to do introspective soul searching to find your passion.

I just turned 30 so I got really introspective as you do, questioning my life. And when I stopped and sort of looked back at the past decade, I realized I had done more work than I thought I had done.

I'm much more introspective than I was, say, thirty years ago.

My songs are very much a kind of psychoanalysis. I am very introspective in my songs, and I am working through, always.

Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency;

When I say you don't have to be a believer, you just have to say - you have to ask the question to say am I concerned about the tough questions in life, being introspective enough to say, who am I, why am I, what am I?

Always try coercing others proves one doesn't want to change himself. (Suka maksain pendapat adalah bukti seseorang tak siap berubah).

And in order to understand ourselves, a crucial step is to acknowledge that the ‘self’ is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update and rewrite. There is a storyteller in my mind that explains who I am, where I am coming from, where I am heading to, and what is happening right now. Like the government spin doctors who explain the latest political upheavals, the inner narrator repeatedly gets things wrong but rarely, if ever, admits it. And just as the government builds up a national myth with flags, icons and parades, so my inner propaganda machine builds up a personal myth with prized memories and cherished traumas that often bear little resemblance to the truth.

Creation, in all its forms, is where I find beauty. If I could travel as far outward as I have inward, I would know with the utmost conviction that distance does not exist.

Don't be fooled. Charlie remembers things the way he wants to remember them. I suppose we all do...And then we spend the rest of our lives basing the way we think about our families on what we THOUGHT happened--instead of what really did.

Then when we did the untitled record, we just didn't feel like putting joke stuff on it, so we didn't. It wasn't really a deliberation or a real introspective thing like, "Are we going to joke on this one, are we not going to joke on this one?" We just didn't feel like it on the untitled one, so we didn't.

Usually, when I do a soundtrack, the music from the movie doesn't have anything to do with me personally. It's music to enhance to the film. My own stuff is more introspective and about what's on going in my head.

Arrangements. I remember his using the word arrangements. What a hateful word it is and all the things it stands for. The things in life that have grand words - Love - sex - life - death - hate - those aren't the things that govern existence at all. It's lots of other pettifogging, degrading things. Things you have to endure, things you never think about until they happen to you. Undertakers, arrangements for funerals, inquests. And servants coming into rooms and pulling the blinds down. Why should blinds be pulled down because Ellie was dead? Of all the stupid things!

By not letting me turn you into something you're not, you've helped me be more of myself.

Divine does not tempt us to see what's in our hearts, it tempts us so we could see what's in our hearts.

I don't want to lead. Never have. Some people might consider such a trait as a weakness, but I don't. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses takes a lot of soul searching and honesty--something not everyone will take the time to explore. Doing so might reveal things they'd rather leave undiscovered.

Her powerlessness even comforted her somehow. Knowing that she couldn't change things - that she didn't have a choice - made living it more bearable.

How we look at life depends on how we see ourselves.

I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember.

I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.

I had no room now for this fear, or for any other fear, because I was filled to the brim with music. And even when it was not literally (audibly) music, there was the music of my muscle-orchestra playing — “the silent music of the body,” in Harvey’s lovely phrase. With this playing, the musicality of my motion, I myself became the music — “You are the music, while the music lasts.” A creature of muscle, motion and music, all inseparable and in unison with each other — except for that unstrung part of me, that poor broken instrument which could not join in and lay motionless and mute without tone or tune.

If I'm afraid to fall then how will I ever fly?

What if … what if … what if … I play the What If? game all the time. But it’s rigged, is the thing. Impossible to win. Asking What If? can only lead to Maybe Things Could Have Been Different, via Was It My Fault?

It is not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart is dark color: it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.

I was thinking of how, when we think of loss in our life, how our sense of ‘home’ was the first thing to go. You know, we lose that place of childhood innocence, of feeling protected. And so many of us spend the rest of our lives trying to reclaim that place called home, that life made simple again.

Live your epitaph

...Nyla was right in predicting that, for me, life would go on into old age and my promise has been kept too, for every now and then over the years, the ghosts have slipped out from the past and I have kept brief company with my friends of long ago.

Love: the impossible combination of being IN the deep end and being OFF the deep end.

My daughter, people are only used to seeing the glorified in a story, because a story is only a tiny, tiny piece of a person’s life. Legends, sacred writings, they’re all like that. But I assure you, dear child, every one of those people up there on that wall felt like, thought like, and suffered like you!

Louis stared at her, nonplussed. He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together when it seemed as if each year brought the news that two or three of their friends' marriages had collapsed was their respect of the mystery--the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic. And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.

Nothing is forever. Except atoms.

Sometimes I feel as if there's an explanation to my life that continues to escape me; that I've missed something noble, something sublime; that in some way I have cheated myself...life is so strange, so harsh.

Self is a sea boundless and measureless.

She wrote that she, too, always felt an outsider "...even to myself.

On the train I saw that world passing my window. It was when I came to see it was I who was passing that my self-centered childhood was over. But it was not until I began to write, that I found the world out there revealing, because memory had become attached to seeing, love had added itself to discovery, and because I recognized in my own continuing longing to keep going, the need I carried inside myself to know - the apprehension, first, and then the passion, to connect myself to it. Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it. This is, of course, simply saying that the outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world. But I was to learn slowly that both these worlds, outer and inner, were different from what they seemed to me in the beginning.

Science has made many advances in my lifetime, but the instrument has yet to be invented that can see clearly into the marriage of a man and a woman.

Sometimes skin to ground [is] the most comforting place; nowhere to go but up.

Sometimes we get so busy with our daily lives we do not take the steps and time necessary to be introspective.

The most introspective of hearts tends to be the most sentimental. We cling to the smallest moments from our past because we fear that emotion will never come our way again.

The afternoon our story begins, the quiet parts of being alive were the busiest: wind unlocking Windows; rainlight nudging curtains apart; fresh-cut grass tickling unsocked feet. Days like this made Alice want to set off on a great adventure.

The fact is that you don't know strangers well enough to reject them. if you don't want to go on the lunch date, it probably has more to do with you-your schedule, your unwillingness to meet someone new, your mood.

The people they had been last summer, the person she had been--Dicey guessed she'd never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances. For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn't matter what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way. And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself. Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again. And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right.

The nice thing about being an adolescent is being able to make mature decisions when you need them and being able to just flow alone with life when you don't.

The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. But each of them had known some unforgotten moment-a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger's face seen in a bus-a moment when each had known a different sense of living. And each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer was necessary. But each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.

Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.

The problem is, we have too many cowardly, spineless, selfish people that would sacrifice their children’s future just to avoid the sacrifice love requires of them in the present. And they expect their children to respect them for that? Do they think we’re idiots just because we’re young?

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. These are frequently artists and performers, adventurers and wide-life devotees. Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.

This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.