introspection quotes

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‚That person I see is a savage monster;‘ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.

I don’t follow all the 48 laws. Like, I’ve never crushed anyone totally.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

I’m an expert typist. I learned in high school. I would close my eyes and just type without worrying about mistakes. I tried to penetrate my heart, and as I let my thoughts drift, things bubbled up to the surface.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

I’m interested in the dream and subconscious mind, the peculiar dream-like quality of our lives, sometime nightmare quality of our lives.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

I’m only going to stand before God and give an account for my life, not for somebody else’s life. If I have a bad attitude, then I need to say there’s no point in me blaming you for what’s wrong in my life.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

When I was a kid, I had a tendency to criticize. But when I did, my mum would whisk me off to the bathroom to stand in front of a mirror. Ten minutes, never less. To think about how criticism is a poor reflection on the one who criticizes.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that, everyone’s had enough of me to last a month.

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

I really have had to swallow my own prejudice at times.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called ‚Ego‘.

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

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves – and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.

I kinda live where I find myself.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.