Best 252 quotes in «introspection quotes» category

Sinner, I would be loth to have thy soul destroyed by wilful self-delusion. . . . So consequently, there is a despair which is a grievous sin; and there is a despair which is absolutely necessary to thy salvation. I would not have thee despair of the sufficiency of the blood of Christ to save thee, if thou believe, and heartily obey him; nor of the willingness of God to pardon and save thee, if thou be such a one; nor yet absolutely of thy own salvation; because, while there is life and time, there is some hope of thy conversion, and so of thy salvation. . . . Never stick at the sadness of the conclusion, man, but acknowledge plainly, If I die before I get out of this estate, I am lost forever. It is as good deal truly with thyself as not; God will not flatter thee, he will deal plainly whether thou do or not. The very truth is, this kind of despair is one of the first steps to heaven(233).

So he explored, explored within himself, scanning himself with a lamp, as if it were not himself at all but some strange monster that he had been commanded to guard.

Some animals carry their shelter wherever they go. Some humans are just the same.

Some days I don't know what is greater. My wisdom, or my stupidity.

Sometimes being overwhelmed by emotions can leave you speechless but even then it is important to identify the correct emotion.

Sometimes I feel like one of those sliding tile puzzles. I just get so dang close to what I want to see in the mirror and who I want to be... but then I have to completely jumble up the pieces to try to get even closer.

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.

So young and so lethargic! As though he had been born to sit and stare like this. Ever since Kiyoaki had confided in him, Shigekuni, who would have been bright and confident, as befitted such an able young man, had undergone a change. Or rather, the friendship between him and Kiyoaki had undergone a strange reversal. For years, each of them had been extremely careful to intrude in no way on the personal life of the other. But now, just three days before, Kiyoaki had suddenly come to him and, like a newly cured patient transmitting his disease to someone else, had passed on to his friend the virus of introspection. It had taken hold so readily that Honda's disposition now seemed a far better host to it than Kiyoaki's. The first major symptom of the disease was a vague sense of apprehension.

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

Stop saying that. If you are weak, then what am I? I can't hold onto anything, because I don't even see myself. This is the punishment for evading everything. Afraid to be rejected. A coward who is overly sensitive to the sorrounding reactions. I don't even notice if no one points it out. "You must be very sad". Compared to anyone, compared to anything else, I don't understand myself the most.

Sull imagined wild brook trout, cold and firm in the fast, healthy current, buried in the water like ingots of precious metal. They hold fast to the bank, laurel-green with bellies of coal-fire. Wilder colors than you'd dare imagine on your own. Stock had destroyed the run--to be truthful, {his family} had--and silky mud rose off the bottom in slow veils where the Angus dropped their hooves. Do rivers have ghosts? Do trout swim in the air?

Stranger: Do you believe in Jesus, my friend? Foreigner: O yes, I do but who the hell are you?

Tamsen lay listening to the crashing of the waves on the beach, the symphony of the ocean competing with the orchestral maneuvers of the first birds singing in the dawn.

Take time to reflect, let ideas flow on their own schedule and let yourself have numerous bad ideas to inspire the good ones.

Talking with Elaine like that, with no judgment from her or anything, seemed to bring my feelings more to the surface so I could look at them. I love times like that; you don't get many of them. (Walker, in STOTAN!)

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The journey towards your inner self is through Solitude!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

[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).

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.

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.

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.

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

Truth suffers from too much analysis. -Ancient Fremen Saying

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?

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