Quotes about Introspection

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.