Inner Life Quotes

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other - above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.”
― Albert Einstein

“...I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward.”
― Susan Cain

“You are one thing only. You are a Divine Being. An all-powerful Creator. You are a Deity in jeans and a t-shirt, and within you dwells the infinite wisdom of the ages and the sacred creative force of All that is, will be and ever was.”
― Anthon St. Maarten, Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny

“You are your master. Only you have the master keys to open the inner locks.”
― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

“What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”
― Mark Twain

“Self is a sea boundless and measureless.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“What goes on inside isn't ever the same as what goes on outside.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers

“If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...”
― Alice James

“The victory over our inner self is a daily struggle. Be strong and do not give up.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

“How much she wanted it - that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one's existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is "possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell.”
― Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation

“The strength of every individual is the grace for great work.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“The "whole good" cannot be had, it would seem, without mustering all the strength of our inner life. Even in the sphere of external possessions there are goods which inherently demand, if they are to be truly ours, far more of us than mere acquisition. "'My garden,' the rich man said; his gardener smiled.”
― Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation

“When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“You don't have to believe in specific conceptions of God in order to be transformed by spiritual longing.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Normal people have nothing to forget, for they never even possess the ability to form memories—because they do not have an inner life to begin with.”
― Sov8840

“A house isn’t built from walls, but from the emotions it dares to hold.”
― Spaarsh R

“From her few visits to the homes of others, she knew kids were supposed to have more posters on their walls to show off their inner life, but she liked her inner life to stay inside her.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Our life stories – apparently so different – are all crossed by much suffering and various dramas, behind which there always seems to be a single, almost desperate question of Man: ‘WHY?”
― Chris Nielsen, Being Pyotr Ilyich: Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later

“I have understood during recent years that perhaps the most precious thing we are all looking for is a MEANING to our existence.”
― Chris Nielsen, Being Pyotr Ilyich: Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later

“From the first days […] I was a woman's soul, with all its specific sensitivity, grace and fragility, trapped in a man's body.”
― Chris Nielsen, Being Pyotr Ilyich: Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later

“And in this dance of light among the leaves, I heard for the first time… music. A huge gift. From God to me.”
― Chris Nielsen, Being Pyotr Ilyich: Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later

“My being ‘vibrated’ exactly as my music sounds. The fire in me burned with a great flame — and it also burned myself.”
― Chris Nielsen, Being Pyotr Ilyich: Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later

“Composing was like a thirst. A thirst for love. I felt the need to be loved but, even more, I felt the need to love, to offer myself. And since I couldn't do that – as no one loved me in the way I dreamed of – I had to ‘consume’ myself in a different way, by offering something of my heart through my music.”
― Chris Nielsen, Being Pyotr Ilyich: Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later

“The music flowed through me, so that I was sometimes living with the feeling that it was difficult for me to keep up with it, to capture it and to write it down on paper. I happened to actually simply transcribe into notes what my heart heard around me, from the world created by God. And for this reason, I felt somehow vaguely (…) that I owed all this to Our Father.”
― Chris Nielsen, Being Pyotr Ilyich: Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later

“Everything I lived was recorded by my heart much more sharply than other spirits. I felt the reality too intensely, as if my soul could be molded by the slightest breeze of wind and it didn't take long for tears to flow almost with anger from my eyes. The pain ran through my whole being in an instant.”
― Chris Nielsen, Being Pyotr Ilyich: Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later

“I understood that Our Father's energy flows through everything like air through a whistle. God is like a breath that passes through people, plants, animals and all kinds of things to animate them. And his breath creates tension, harmonies and moans... It's like an expiration. (…) This energy of Our Father, which gives life and sustains the whole physical world, created the music I was perceiving. My music, which wasn't really mine...”
― Chris Nielsen, Being Pyotr Ilyich: Tchaikovsky’s Inner Life, Revealed by Himself 130 Years Later