Introspection Quotes

“So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.

The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“A good roast of sun, it slows you, lets you relax–and out here if there's anything wrong, you can see it coming with bags of time to do what's next. This is the place and the weather for peace, for the cultivation of a friendly mind.”
― A.L. Kennedy, Day

“So he explored, explored within himself, scanning himself with a lamp, as if it were not himself at all but some strange monster that he had been commanded to guard.”
― Hermann Bahr

“He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it." Pope Alexander”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March Of Folly: From Troy To Vietnam

“It's fine to feel truer than others.
But it's much truer to fix our fault.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Find yourself first, and be surprised at how quickly and logically “the” one just appears in front of you.”
― Yasmina Diallo, From Catwalk To Freedom

“I've learned that there is no currency like trust and no catalyst like hope. There is nothing worse for building relationships than pandering, on one hand, and preaching, on the other. And the most important quality we must all strengthen in ourselves is that of a deep human empathy, for that will provide the most hope of all--and the foundation for our collective survival.”
― Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

“When corruptors blame each other, the strongest wins.
Apabila sesama koruptor saling menyalahkan, yang terkuat menang.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Introspection precedes constructive criticism.
Introspeksi mendahului kritik yang membangun.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“How they are all about, these gentlemen
In chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced,
Like night around their order's star and gem
And growing ever darker, stony-faced,
And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but propped
High by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped,
Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles:
How they surround each one of these who stopped
To read and contemplate the objects d'art,
Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours.

Whit exquisite decorum they allow us
A life of whose dimensions we seem sure
And which they cannot grasp. They were alive
To bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature,
That is to be of darkness and to strive.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Best of Rilke

“It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror.

More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I'd stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn't I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be?”
― Austin Grossman, You

“I'm sorry," Leo murmured and then seemed to look through Martin for a few seconds before he returned his gaze to him. "Although if it's any comfort - and please don't take this the wrong way, because I speak from my own perspective, which I understand often places me far outside of the norm - I sometimes like to think that death, at least in the case of those we truly love, allows us to appreciate what they have done for us in ways that are not possible when we're all here, constantly changing and fixated on how to get from one day to the next. Death offers us the chance to reflect on who they were, which of course is a way to understand ourselves. As painful as it can be to see them go - and I don't mean to diminish the sense of loss or grief we all feel - there is also no greater gift.”
― Matthew Gallaway, The Metropolis Case

“What is sitting behind your judgments? What fears are you coddling?”
― Akiroq Brost

“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, The Dead Forest

“I do like my life. I flail for meaning sometimes, maybe too often, but it is a full life, and a life I own. I have learned this of myself, that I cannot do without people and I cannot do without stretches of sustained isolation. To be alone is not always to be lonely. Sometimes I withdraw for weeks merely to be with myself, and I sink into reading, my life’s great pleasure, and I think, and I enjoy the silence of my own musing.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count

“As long as one does not mistake one’s net-worth for self-worth, it is okay to be a loser or a failure.”
― Achal Bakeri

“The crisis enters the political scene like the glove that fits on a mime's hand, who, without color and without sound, creates drama and laughter at a traffic light.”
― Paulo Ricardo Zargolin

“It’s like the tree of life, its branches stretch far and wide, but they all grow from the same trunk. That trunk is our bond.”
― Pete Bartik, THE SUN WILL RISE

“We wear our realities like a favorite pair of jeans—day after day, fraying quietly at the seams. Held together by habit, hope, or something unnamed. Until one day, a single thread gives way, and suddenly, everything we've hidden is laid bare.”
― Lawrence Nault

“To write is to remember out loud. Sometimes for the world. Sometimes just so the silence knows it was heard.”
― Lawrence Nault

“I was content, sated. I was where I was supposed to be. Yet in quiet moments, alone, I feared that my contentment was a kind of resignation.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count

“Why was a novel a metaphor for unrealistic, anyway? Novels had always felt to me truer to what was real.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count

“You can write popular posts on a website, you can have a surfeit of things, and still have an empty life, so there really is no way to prove to someone else the fullness of your own life. Your true experience is the only proof.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count

“Was it malice or stupidity?
Doha had found that the motivation for most confusing attributes of other people could be classified into one of those two categories.
Someone cutting in a line? Either they were too oblivious to notice the queue (stupidity—unaware of one’s surroundings) or simply didn’t care that they were inconveniencing others (malice—a prioritization of the self above others).
So, in the case of Renee refusing to call him by his preferred name, Doha had quickly inferred that she was either consistently forgetful, even after multiple reminders (stupid to a pitiful degree) or determined to call him what she wanted to, regardless of his preference (malicious, but in a rude, undercutting sort of way).”
― Molly Collier, The Paragon

“Reflection is not just thinking, it is the bridge between the mind and the heart.”
― Tayser Bataineh, when the Human Remembers: when the Human Remembers

“The journey inward is the only path where every step reveals a truth you’ve always known.”
― Tayser Bataineh, when the Human Remembers: when the Human Remembers

“The mind seeks answers outside, but the soul speaks only within.”
― Tayser Bataineh, when the Human Remembers: when the Human Remembers

“My own feelings are a hedge of briars that i can't bring myself to touch. There are so many unhappy people, I just don't want to find out that I am one of them. They walk among us, they touch you, and you become them. Introspection is like cyanide.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn