Quotes about Introspection

Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor.

He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.

After all, what is an individual?

After all, what is an individual?

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.

If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.

I, real I? But where, but how, but at what price?

I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs," the writer and philosopher recollected. "Those folds in the trousers ? what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel ? how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous.

I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs," the writer and philosopher recollected. "Those folds in the trousers ? what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel ? how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous.

Turning to God without turning from self' - the formula is absurdly simple; and yet, simple as it is, it explains all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion.

I'm feeling miserable . . . There was no self-pity in his tone, no appeal for sympathy ? only the angry matter-of-factness of a Stoic who has finally grown sick of the long farce of impassibility and is resentfully blurting out the truth.

It is because we don't know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, and sometime criminal ways that are so characteristically human.