Introspection Quotes

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.

~ John Ruskin

But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?

~ Robertson Davies

Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.

~ Anaïs Nin

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.

~ Haruki Murakami

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.

~ Haruki Murakami

Pride is a fallacy. None of us are greater than the sum of our parts.

~ Eric Hirzel

On the brink of sleep I have a gloomy thought: that saving yourself is only pushing yourself even deeper into the trap rather than getting out. Dying is the only way out.

~ Erri De Luca

You will never change, unless you are honest with yourself or you are forced to be authentic by someone that was honest with him or herself.

~ Shannon L. Alder

It's fine to feel truer than others.But it's much truer to fix our fault.

~ Toba Beta

Cheating on self, is a paralysis of being.

~ Unarine Ramaru

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.

~ Erica Goros

Bells ringing with no soundLaughter with no voiceHappiness lost without being foundMaking love with no noise

~ T. Grassan

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

~ Sol Luckman

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation p

~ Robert Hughes

[O]ur applications are quicker about our sufferings, than our sins(77)[.]

~ Richard Baxter

Your real self may be hiding somewhere, look for it within, when you find yourself, you can freely be what you want to be.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Sometimes your belief system is really your fears attached to rules.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

~ Philip K. Dick

Look within, There is no difference between yourself, Self and Guru. You are always Free. There is no teacher, there is no student, there is no teaching.

~ H.w.l. Poonja

At some point in life every person encounters haunting feelings of loneliness, because the feeling of being alone and withdrawing deeply into the inner self is part of the human condition. A person might choose to countenance or even cultivate their loneliness and turn the poignant hours of unerring solitude into poetry of their soul.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

There has never been a moment in one's life when one might not have stumbled upon this strange reality: What am I doing, where am I so hurriedly running, what is my objective, this whole world is a rat race and I'm going no where, with out any goal, Isn't it?. This thought comes to me very often. Alas! what to do, don't know what and where to knock the door and experience reality. No sooner that i try, I'm again fallen into the dismal depths of abyss, into the worldly affairs

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

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.

~ Lisa Scottoline

By not letting me turn you into something you're not, you've helped me be more of myself.

~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

There is no amount of bad karma that can compete with a contrite spirit and God's forgiveness.

~ Shannon L. Alder

How, when and what you perceive - defines your life!

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

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

~ Ken Poirot

Investigation in our own life is far more rewarding than investigating life of other's.

~ Aditya Ajmera

How we look at life depends on how we see ourselves.

~ Justin Young

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

~ Marcel Proust

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

~ Alexander Pope

Mom, Dad, I’m fourteen, I see what the world is like. And, no, I did not get this from the psychologist...I came to this understanding on my own, from what I really see in myself and about life.

~ Darryl Steven Markowitz

It seemed that for every evil they defeated, worse took its place, but Vaughn banished the thought that this all might be a cruel game, a hoax played on the… ''No! I know what true Goodness, true Life, true Love is. Besides, this is too miserable to be a game…unless demons…NO! Besides, even if I was some kind of pawn, well, then this game piece would rebel!

~ Darryl Steven Markowitz

I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.

~ Roman Payne

No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will - whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection....

~ Lawrence Durrell

No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

We inhabit an internal world that is subject to diversification. Every day we undergo personal transformation based upon experiences, thoughts, and feelings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Modern day information overload stops us sufficiently engaging with our thoughts.

~ Sam Owen

It takes effort and concern to really think about things.

~ Sam Owen