introspection quotes

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.

The reason I talk to myself is that I’m the only one whose answers I accept.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

Man’s enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself.

All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

Only God can look at somebody’s heart.

Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

Man is a universe within himself.

People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

I’m selfish.

I don’t know what ‚normal‘ means, anyway.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for – scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

Somewhere deep down there’s a decent man in me, he just can’t be found.

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

Many years ago, I concluded that a few hair shirts were part of the mental wardrobe of every man. The president differs from other men in that he has a more extensive wardrobe.

Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don’t see what goes on underground – as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don’t see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

Go on thinking that you don’t need to be read and you’ll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won’t feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

The lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

Here’s something that’s contrary to popular belief: I actually don’t like thinking. I think people think I like to think a lot. And I don’t. I do not like to think at all.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

Good men by nature, wish to know. I know that many will call this useless work… men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that of wisdom, which is the food and only true riches of the mind.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.