Introspection Quotes

“When you travel mentally from a low point to a high point, the ensuing inspiration eclipses the negativity of the initial downfall.”
― Raoul Davis Jr., Firestarters: How Innovators, Instigators, and Initiators Can Inspire You to Ignite Your Own Life

“Belief that you can act is a powerful motivator. Belief that change can happen in a flash is an even stronger motivator.”
― Raoul Davis Jr., Firestarters: How Innovators, Instigators, and Initiators Can Inspire You to Ignite Your Own Life

“I allowed the union between the earth and my body, I let go, and for the first time in my life I appreciated everything for what it was, observed the miracle of it. The earth for being the earth, my hands for being my hands, the plants for growing out of seeds, and the others around me, everyone, with their own rights and dreams and interior worlds.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“As the day drains
out the window, I become more and more
the focus of my own gaze.”
― Emily Pittinos

“I found it strange how people could sit in an airplane flying miles high at hundreds of speeds and not think about it. We got used to magnificent things. I wanted to think it’s cool every time I fly. I wouldn’t want to act overdramatic but just sit there and look out the window for a moment and process what I’m doing. Really process it. Maybe before turning on a movie or going back to normal life, I would begin the flight with a moment like that.”
― J. Aleong, A Most Important Year

“All I can say is that I felt alive and didn’t want to think about anything else besides this moment.”
― J. Aleong, A Most Important Year

“Memory is like surveillance footage: Everything gets picked up but you don't really review it unless there's an incident.”
― Tony Dokoupil

“Me voici dans un coin de mon âme ; vous n’imaginez pas le désordre qui règne ici.”
― Cécile Coulon, Les Ronces

“Rain and storm—'tis not such things that count. Many a time some little joy can come along on a rainy day, and make a man turn off somewhere to be alone with his happiness—stand up somewhere and look out straight ahead, laughing quietly now and again, and looking around. What is there to think of? One clear pane in a window, a ray of sunlight in the pane, the sight of a little brook, or maybe a blue strip of sky between the clouds. It needs no more than that.

At other times, even quite unusual happenings cannot avail to lift a man from dullness and poverty of mind; one can sit in the middle of a ballroom and be cool, indifferent, unaffected by anything. Sorrow and joy are from within oneself.”
― Knut Hamsun, Pan

“None of us lives without loss. Or regret. But none of us need live without imagination. We can learn to see past ourselves.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love

“I figured that distance happens and connections fade, and I wouldn’t want anyone to feel obligated to stay friends with me. That wasn’t fair to ask. It just seemed to happen a lot with me.”
― J. Aleong, A Most Important Year

“In a large city the unhappy feel their sadness less acutely.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

“The hnakra is our enemy, but he is also our beloved. We feel in our hearts his joy as he looks down from the mountain of water in the north where he was born; we leap with him when he jumps the falls; and when winter comes, and the lake smokes higher than our heads, it is with his eyes that we see it and know that his roaming time is come.”
― C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

“How quickly what is good can become not good enough through comparison. Maybe best never to see it.”
― Catherine Steadman, Something in the Water

“An empty room can be an instrument for introspection. It was a reflection of the void created by the decision to distance myself from a relationship that had defined me to others and to myself. If I was not a wife, who was I? I was removing a label that marked my place in a social system, but was I still “me” without that label?”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“From the point of view of an inhabitant of the Old World, marsupials are exceedingly odd. But oddity is not the same as randomness. Kangaroos and wallabies may lack verisimilitude; but their improbability repeats itself and obeys recognizable laws. The same is true of the psychological creatures inhabiting the remoter regions of our minds. The experiences encountered under the influence of mescalin or deep hypnosis are certainly strange; but they are strange with a certain regularity, strange according to a pattern.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“Things felt a little different and that was OK.
Life would never stay in one place, after all. I was just glad to have my friends.”
― J. Aleong, A Most Important Year

“If we’re not mindful about what it is to be mindful, then never-mind.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“If we are to learn what we mean to each other, we must first examine what we mean to ourselves. And we must be fearless and honest in that attempt —”
― Matthew López, The Inheritance

“Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference. That is just not true. Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume. When the sound is quieter, you can actually hear what someone else is saying. And that can make a world of difference,”
― Nikki Haley

“A passionate Marxist journalist - waiting for the revolution, rejecting all 'palliatives' - told me that the 'workers' of India had to be politicized; they had to be told that it was the 'system' that oppressed them. After nearly thirty years of power, the Congress has, understandably, become the system. But where does the system begin and end? Does it take in religion, the security of caste and clan, Indian ways of perceiving, karma, the antique serfdom? But no Indian cares to take political self-examination that far. No Indian can take himself to the stage where he might perceive that the faults lie within the civilization itself, that the failure and the cruelties of India might implicate all Indians. Even the Marxists, dreaming of a revolution occurring like magic on a particular day, of tyranny swept away, of 'the people' then engaging in the pleasures of 'folk' activities - the Marxist journalist's word: the folk miraculously whole after the millennia of oppression - even the Marxist's vision of the future is not of a country undone and remade but of an India essentially returned to itself, purified: a vision of Ramraj.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“J'avais plusieurs visages parce que j'étais jeune et que je ne savais pas moi-même qui j'étais et qui je voulais être.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“We go through life carrying our own cultural baggage, all of it internalized and programmed into our subconscious.”
― Cristina Ho, Discover Cultural Intelligence: Your New Superpower

“Going inward was not easy. By looking outward, I could create my ideal home, a dream that I had previously deferred in the interest of family harmony.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Every moment spent “doing” meant less time for silence or for self and less opportunity for introspection.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Ver a una mujer, y sentir en ese mismo instante que también ella me ha visto, que sus ojos interrogantes han quedado prendados de mí cómo si no tuviéramos más remedio que encontrarnos en el umbral de lo ignoto, de esa frontera oscura y melancólica de la conciencia...”
― Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Eine Frau zu sehen

“Pero, ¿podía haber algo que infundiera más miedo que otra noche de espera, otro día de tensión, el no-suceder, el no-actuar? ¿Acaso no se había alcanzado un punto culminante, por encima del cual solo estaba el vacío?”
― Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Eine Frau zu sehen

“The more we deny the possibility of death, the more it will scare us. Think about death as a certainty, and start seizing every moment as our last.”
― Shon Mehta, Lair Of The Monster

“We cannot fully be human without thinking about what being human means. Our forms of momentary self-indulgence are many, but it is hyperactivity which is out favoured as well as most pervasive form of hedonism; and by its very nature, it is a form of gratification which undermines reflection - and well-being - of a deeper or more sustained kind.”
― Eva Hoffman, How to Be Bored

“Adam laid in the dark for a long time, thinking and not thinking. Thinking in an indirect way in the fashion one knows the sun is there without having to look straight at the thing.”
― Exurb1a, The Fifth Science