Quotes about Introspection
There is great pain and suffering in the world. But the pain hardest to bear is your own.
— Henri Nouwen
Sometimes we feel trapped in our humanness. We experience keenly how things fall short of our expectations.
— Henri Nouwen
Our first task is to dispel this vague, murky feeling of discontent and to look critically at how we are living our lives. This requires honesty, courage, and trust. We must honestly unmask and courageously confront our many self-deceptive games. We must trust that our honesty and courage will lead us not to despair, but to a new heaven and a new earth.
— Henri Nouwen
In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness." - Out of Solitude
— Henri Nouwen
In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness." - Out of Solitude
— Henri Nouwen
Solitude is the furnace in which transformation takes place.
— Henri Nouwen
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
— Henry David Thoreau
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
— Henry David Thoreau
It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.
— Henry David Thoreau
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.
— Henry David Thoreau
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
— Henry David Thoreau
The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.
— Henry David Thoreau