Best 252 quotes in «introspection quotes» category

That's what being Jewish is: summoning the means to question who you are and how you have behaved. Have you remained alight in the darkness of cruel wishes,..? Have you forgiven? Have you lived up to the standards of your one and only heart?

The ability to control the devil in you, defines the strength of your conscience!

The act of going within, finding our truth, and then sharing it, it helps us far more than we know.

The beauty of the past lies in-between the perpetual unhappiness of the future and of those who live it.

The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves," I say. I nod and nod, driving the message home. "Not on others," I say.

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

The journey towards your inner self is through Solitude!

The Greeks had Hydra and Cyclops. We have Nietzsche and Pessoa: monsters of introspection and thought.

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)]

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

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

The mind is a miraculous mirror through which we see the world, but it can also see from within.

The power of really seeing things as they are is the most under-valued gift you can give yourself.

The night air was still and damp rising from the mud banks of the creek. Our lives had been determined by the random flow of water through weaknesses in the soil. Where there was water there was humanity. Especially now, with no stable forms of transportation, our villages were all based on the flow of water. From the sides of the mountains we’d traversed just days ago it looked like an open expanse of nothing. From here it looked like an open expanse of nothing. Staring into the void above, it was the same nothing. Staring into my heart was the only form of anything solid and that was suspect at best.

The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

The past may not hurt you, but it won't challenge you, either.

The proper conceptual view is attained only through introspection.

There are some things about oneself that it’s not very nice to wake up to.

There are certain truths that occurs to us, which we cannot convey in words, but requires a personal experience to grasp more vividly.

The purpose of your life is to be and to do. Who are you? What are you doing? These are fundamental questions if you want to find your path.

The reason I'm attracted to the light of Scripture is because there's another side of me that is dark. The reason I am interested in men of peace is because I'm not like them and would like to be. I'm not someone in real life who turns the other cheek.

There is a goodness in the world that got me through, that taught me it's important to know who you are.

The reluctant will heed wisdom only when the confidence exhibited by the righteous awakens the seed of introspection,and the awareness of acountability, into the psyche of the uncertain.

…there is not a day of my life that I am not critiquing myself to see if my politics are borne out in the way that I live and the way that I talk and present myself.

There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I am such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting.

There was someplace urgent he needed to be, and he wasn't going to make it there on time. It was a gorgeous calamity in scale, I thought. A lovely misfortune. Immediate and irreversible and very soon forgotten. We needed more troubles like that.

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.

The story of a man's soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation, especially if it is based on the self-analysis of a mature mind and is written with no vain desire to rouse our sympathy and curiosity. The problem with Rousseau's Confessions is that he read them to his friends.

They were quiet for a while, eating, then Oromis asked, "Can you tell me, What is the most important mental tool a person can possess?" It was a serious question, and Eragon considered it for a reasonable span before he ventured to say, "Determination." Oromis tore the loaf in half with his long white fingers. "I can understand why you arrived at that conclusion-determination has served you well in your adventures-but no. I meant the tool most necessary to choose the best course of action in any given situation. Determination is as common among men who are dull and foolish as it is among those who are brilliant intellects. So, no, determination cannot be what we're looking for.

The third person. There was no sign of this happiness on the outside, she knew. She was bored by this happiness that seemed out of place, impatient to get rid of it. The feeling was less pleasurable than she had imagined it might have been, less well-defined, and when she felt along its strings she found it was not easily traced or attached to the objects she thought it might have been attached to. Perhaps it was not attached to anything at all.

The true knowing, living Christian complains more frequently and more bitterly of the wants and woes within him, than without him(55).

The whole world was out there, but I was in my mother's arms, and I didn't know it yet.

The world is a palace without bedsheets

[T]his is the strongest encouragement to them in sinning; and we have need to lay all our batteries against this bulwark of presumption (361).

This is not a feel-good book. (But I am confident you will feel good after reading it.) It is not a motivational book. (But I promise you will be motivated once you are done.)

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.

To achieve happiness, we must continuously reflect and evaluate on our true thoughts and emotions in order to align them with our goals and desires, but most of all, our dreams for tomorrow.

To be fair, I spend most days living inside my head--hoping that when I finally open my mouth or put pen to paper, what comes out will matter.

Those terms haunt me, -- in the way of all aspersions that contain a germ of truth. I have been unable to banish them. They sit on my shoulders and mutter in my ears during all my moments of doubt.

True peace is not found in external circumstances, but within ones own heart.

True inspiration unfolds itself, not by force or it becomes fake. True intuition is also the ability to be observant.

Trust not yourself; but your defects to know, Make use of ev'ry friend—and ev'ry foe.

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.

Try seeing, feeling, and tasting the water you swim in the way a land animal might perceive it. You may find the experience fascinating -- and mind-expanding.

Truth suffers from too much analysis. -Ancient Fremen Saying

Unless you are willing to examine your personal, philosophical, and emotional issues, you cannot fully comprehend the application of Sun Tzu's ideas.

Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?

What does introspection mean? It means you're looking in the wrong direction.

Well, enough of this introspection. It’s depressing, quite frankly.

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.