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f338998
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Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.
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self-discovery
introspection
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Lewis Carroll |
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2ea1668
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You can't lie to your soul.
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introspection
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Irvine Welsh |
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271e2ab
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When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points.
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helpful
karma
inspirational
self-improvement
introspection
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Confucius |
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b13b73b
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The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
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progress
philosophical
philosophy
dressing
innovation
melancholy
thinking
thought
introspection
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Ray Bradbury |
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226eb20
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Self is a sea boundless and measureless.
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introspect
limitless
measureless
introspective
endless
inner-life
self
sea
introspection
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Kahlil Gibran |
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7c1b2f8
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So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.
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introspection
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John Gardner |
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d97c7a0
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I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal. College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain. Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed--maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it.
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good-intentions
modernism
existential-crisis
japan
novel
introspection
psychology
|
Haruki Murakami |
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2d7d217
|
that's exactly the good thing about the Injun life--you don't have to stop and think about whether or not you're 'happy'--which in my opinionis a highly overrated human condition invented by white folks
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subsistence
self-reflection
introspection
|
Jim Fergus |
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413af38
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I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness.
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escape
introspection
beat-generation
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Allen Ginsberg |
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1698ae6
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Asa-i de cand lumea, ca cine se introspecteaza prea mult, acela nu mai e de acord nici cu sine insusi, in cele din urma, iar cine nu-i de acord cu sine insusi, acela nu-i capabil sa ia o hotarare.
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world
decision
capability
introspection
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Henryk Sienkiewicz |
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dd5009a
|
He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advancing years. Seized with weariness, he sat down on the wall, and the river murmured darkly in his thoughts.
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pain
death
life
introspection
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Hermann Hesse |
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3bf365c
|
He had too much to think about. In the course of his long, useless marches he had sunk deeper and deeper into the tangle of his botched life as into a clump of brambles, and still he had found no meaning or consolation.
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life
introspection
|
Hermann Hesse |
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b79ee3f
|
I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind. If all of human knowledge, everything that's known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all. Few people travel here. There's no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile. In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one's way out.
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|
enlightenment
philosophy
high-country
montana
mountains
wild
meditation
reflection
consciousness
awareness
thought
introspection
|
Robert M. Pirsig |
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81b7dd6
|
Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.
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reflection
despair
introspection
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Saul Bellow |
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7624765
|
...while the outside world was full of danger, I knew my interior. I was certain that I could oust an intruder there.
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|
fairy-tales
fairytale
princesses
introvert
introspection
|
Gail Carson Levine |
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b79ba96
|
No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he's realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about 'criminals,' as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.
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|
introspection
|
G.K. Chesterton |
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e442049
|
Let him who thinks war is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking honour and praise and valour and love of country ... Let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realize how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all youth and joy and life into a fetid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that victory is worth the death of even one of these?
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war
wisdom
reflection
introspection
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Wade Davis |
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31adbc9
|
"Pico Iyer: "And at some point, I thought, well, I've been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I've spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around--you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there's this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps."
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|
enlightenment
travel
nature
spirit
humanity
faith
beauty
wisdom
inner-landscape
mindfulness
peace
mystery
introspection
|
Krista Tippett |
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3fd42cf
|
Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.
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|
psychological
philosophical
thoughtful
introspection
psychology
|
Anaïs Nin |
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293a6a1
|
I like to see the people arriving. I like to imagine their lives. It keeps me from thinking too much about my own. A man shouldn't be too introspective. It weakens him. That is the difference between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. I'm a Hemingway man myself although I don't believe it is right to hunt lions.
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life
tennessee-williams
hunting
thinking
lives
introspection
|
Jeanette Winterson |
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7f701a0
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Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck.
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|
motivational
reflection
introspection
|
Roger Zelazny |
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816a89e
|
I learned that protecting someone by keeping him away from me doesn't shelter either of us. I learned that feeling other people's feelings for them doesn't bring us closer, it only separates me from myself and my needs. I always thought being codependent meant being too emotionally glued to someone; I didn't realize the way I was doing it was setting me adrift.
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relationship
love
introspection
|
Lisa Scottoline |
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2f2a032
|
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.
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|
present
time
history
past
reflection
introspection
memory
|
Iris Murdoch |
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9b1603e
|
"It's only when you stop to think about it. I don't stop. - From "Morning"
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|
humor
motion
reflection
introspection
|
Donald Barthelme |
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aaac802
|
Say I hit your number, called you up, you'd wonder what the fuck, every one of youse, and your mouth'd go dry. Maybe you're just some stranger I pocket-dialled. Or one of them shitheads from school I could look for. Any of youse heard my voice now you'd think it was weather. Or a bird screaming. You'd be sweating sand. Like I'm the end of the world.
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|
self-aggrandisement
introspection
|
Tim Winton |
|
a0b3b60
|
Strange how you could become a man's god without noticing.
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|
power
introspection
|
Richard K. Morgan |