Quotes about Introspection

The time when, most of all, you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

We are not certain, we are never certain.

We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we at last come to look upon them as virtues.

Nothing is more like a wise man than a fool who holds his tongue.

I observed once to Goethe ... that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied, "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself, and he exists only in your head; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself."

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as they tie their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

We know only that we are living in these bodies and have a vague idea, because we have heard it, and because our faith tells us so, that we possess souls. As to what good qualities there may be in our souls, or who dwells within them, or how precious they are, those are things which we seldom consider and so we trouble little about carefully preserving the soul's beauty.

True happiness is of a retired nature and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self; and, in the next, from the friendship and conversations of a few select companions.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

Whosoever would be a man must be a non-conformist.

Each man is his own absolute lawgiver and dispenser of glory or gloom to himself, the maker of his life, his reward, his punishment.

A man is a kind of inverted thermometer, the bulb uppermost, and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.