"Introspection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man who can make other men forget themselves has conferred upon the world a priceless boon. Introspection is insanity—to open the windows and look out ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... grace. The pangs of conscience, the fears and hopes, the triumph and despair of the soul which were the preoccupations of the Puritan, were phenomena unknown to the ancient Greek. He lived and acted undisturbed by scrupulous introspection; and the function of his religion was rather to quiet the conscience by ritual than to excite it by ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... fell with a thud on the floor; but he was old and wise, and soon fell again to his meal. I sat drumming my heels against the corn bin. Evening was falling fast, and everything was very still. No man ever had a more favorable hour for reflection and introspection. I employed it to the full. Then I rose, and crossing the stable, pulled the long ears of my friend ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... not really leaning upon physiological theory. The appeal to our knowledge of the brain facilitates the conception of the immediacy of our feelings of relation; but that immediacy would be apparent to a sharp introspection. We do not need to think of the eye or skin to feel that light and heat are ultimate data; no more do we need to think of cerebral excitements to see that right and left, before and after, good and bad, one and two, like and unlike, are irreducible feelings. The categories ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... that the study of emotions is to a great extent a study of character, and that in this instance, we have given a tabulation of Rab's traits of character. It is through the showing of his feelings that Rab influences us. A little introspection shows that we are feeling just what the dog feels, or that some emotion is aroused in us that responds to the feeling of the dog. We are not exactly surprised when the bulldog grips Rab, but we are indignant that he should have ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... had forgotten that he had promised to save her. He had forgotten that he meant to snuff out as many lives as might stand between her and freedom. The very remembrance sheered off his morbid introspection. She made a difference. How strange for him to realize that! He felt grateful to her. He had been forced into outlawry; she had been stolen from her people and carried into captivity. They had met in the river fastness, he to instil hope into her ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... only assume that the resistance must be unconscious. Usually, it will be necessary to work through this unconscious resistance before the subject responds. If the subject is conditioning himself, this will involve a great deal of introspection, and even then it is an extremely difficult job. One doesn't usually have proper insight into one's own emotional make-up. The end result is that one can only ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... what lies beyond the scope of external observation, however, reveals itself all the more clearly in the realms where nature is active on the widest scale. Certainly, we must school ourselves to read aright the phenomena which come to light in those realms. And once more we must look to the way of introspection, previously mentioned, for aid in investing our gaze with the necessary intuitive force. If we succeed in this, then the heavens will become for us a text wherein secrets of human nature, hidden from mere ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... town filled with troops—British and French. Instead of living alone or with one companion, he occupied quarters in a big yamen full of officers and men—a change which probably benefited a character too given to seriousness and introspection. ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... With the distrustful introspection of maiden youth, she suddenly asked herself whether by any possibility she were different from other girls and whether she had not some strange defect, physical or mental, of which the existence had been most carefully ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... and iron barred. Clark stopped here for a moment and looked back at St. Marys with its flaming maples and its scattered roofs from which rose plumes of light, gray smoke. His eyes half closed as though in some sudden introspection, till, turning abruptly, he struck off over a road that led across a mile of level land and came presently to the grave of the industrial hopes of the town. It was an ugly scar in the face of the ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... this fissure in the walls of his neurotic soul he peered and saw its strange perturbations, divined their origins in the very roots of his being, and recorded—as did Poe, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche—the fluctuations of his sick will. With this Russian, his Hamlet-like introspection becomes vertigo, and life itself fades into a dream compounded of febrile melancholy or blood lust. It was not without warrant that he allows Rogoszin, in The Idiot, to murder Nastasia Philipovna, because of her physical charms. The aura ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... disturbance of the mental balance may easily pass into actual destruction of it. * * * * * What such patients need to learn is, not the indulgence but a forgetfulness of their feelings, not the observation but the renunciation of self, not introspection but useful action." (The italics are ours.)—Maudsley, Body and Mind, 2d Edition, pp. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... on ad libitum unto the third and fourth and final generation of those who [10] love God and keep His commandments. Hence the following is an amendment of the paragraph on page 47(6) of "Retrospection and Introspection":— ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... idleness is that it so often means introspection, worry, and impatience, especially to those conscientious souls who would fain be about ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... gross in this descent into slavery, but poor Desborough did not see it, for he was not given to self-introspection. He only knew that he was happy. A word exalted him, and he never ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... time to have risen above or sunk below a certain level of excellence. Andre, extolled by her latest critics as "a delicious eclogue of the fields," was contemporary with the bombastic, false Byronism of Jacques; the feeble narrative of La Mare au Diable with the passion-introspection of Lucrezia Floriani. The ever-popular Consuelo immediately succeeded the feeble Compagnon du Tour de France. La Marquise, written in the first year of her literary life, shows a power of projection out of herself, and of delicate analysis, hardly to be surpassed; but ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... skimmed the surface of other nations.—But why am I talking like this? Whither am I tending? It is indeed shameful that an author who long ago reached man's estate, and was brought up to a course of severe introspection and sober, solitary self-enlightenment, should give way to such jejune wandering from the point. To everything its proper time and place and turn. As I was saying, it does not lie in me to take a virtuous character for my ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... would never forget the failures of that year, but she also knew that the comfort of accustomed activities would help to fill his mind and keep his thoughts from sore introspection. Here in Topeka there was nothing to do but cogitate and reflect. It was therefore a relief to her when Elizabeth received a letter from her mother summoning her home to teach a spring term of school. While at any ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not unnaturally—for he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of introspection—he mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... closed in to a dark and dreary night when the steward came from the potter's door to proceed homewards again. The gloom did not tend to raise his spirits, and in the total lack of objects to attract his eye, he soon fell to introspection as before. It was along the margin of turnip fields that his path lay, and the large leaves of the crop struck flatly against his feet at every step, pouring upon them the rolling drops of moisture gathered upon their broad surfaces; but the annoyance was unheeded. Next ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... another thing, may not this religious reticence, in these devout good souls, be perhaps a merit, and sign of health in them? Jocelin, Eadmer, and such religious men, have as yet nothing of 'Methodism;' no Doubt or even root of Doubt. Religion is not a diseased self-introspection, an agonising inquiry: their duties are clear to them, the way of supreme good plain, indisputable, and they are travelling on it. Religion lies over them like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and life-element, which is not spoken of, which in all things is presupposed ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... clasping her knees and the level sun in her eyes. Her thoughts were soon faraway on the misty trail they had worn for themselves in the many years they had traversed the wilderness in search of what it held, and the eyes between the narrowed lids became blank with introspection. And as she sat thus, a little way withdrawn from the scurrying activity of the scene, there came a step on the soft green sod and a slim form in buckskins ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... life-talking in the distance. It came with its strange excitement into a being held by soft and marvellous memories, by one long vision of Noel and the moonlit grass, under the dark Abbey wall. This moment of passage from wonder to wonder was quite too much for a boy unused to introspection, and he stood staring stupidly at Calais, while the thunder of his new life came rolling in on that passionate ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... exemplify it in greater perfection. As his countrymen have frequently pointed out, these firstfruits of Goethe's genius mark a new departure in lyrical poetry. In them we have the direct simplicity of the best lyrics of the past, but combined with this simplicity a depth of introspection and a fusion of nature with human feeling which is a new content in the imaginative presentation of human experience. In connection with Goethe's Leipzig period we gave a specimen of the best work he was then capable of producing; when we place beside it such a poem as the following, we are ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... sorrow. But sorrow often does much to develop the musician's character, to make him look into himself and discover his more serious purposes. This might also be accomplished by some such means of self-introspection as "Christian Science." Although I am not a "Christian Scientist," I am a great believer ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... to become either a cynic, a pessimist, or an iconoclast. To aspire in either of these directions is bad for the digestion, and good digestion is the foundation and source of much that is desirable in human affairs. Introspection has its uses, to be sure, but the stomach should have exemption as an objective. A stomach is a valuable asset if only one is not conscious of it. One of the emoluments of schoolmastering is the opportunity it affords for communing with elect souls whose very presence is a tonic. Will ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... peace of mind. How Shakespeare occupied himself during these years we may never know, though it is very probable that he worked in the capacity of assistant to his father. That these were years of introspection and remorse to one of his spirit, however, there can be little doubt; there can be still less doubt that they were also years of formative growth, and that in this interval the irresponsible youth, who had ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... Ghek made a little noise in his throat as one does who would attract attention. "You speak as one who has thought much upon many subjects. Is it, then, possible that you of the red race have pleasure in thought? Do you know aught of the joys of introspection? Do reason and logic form ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... up within the blind walls of his own self, the self-transcending impulse of love would be impossible. If man's inner consciousness is to be conceived as a dark room shutting out the world, upon whose shadowy phenomena the candle of introspection throws a dim and uncertain light, then he can have no interest outside of himself; nor can he ever take that first step in goodness, which carries him beyond his narrow individuality to seek and find a larger self in others. ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... these little people are perpetually seeking to interest others in themselves, their doubts, and feelings. If wisely dealt with, not by direct ridicule, but by a wholesome neglect of the child's revelations, treating them as of no special interest or importance, and discouraging that minute introspection which, of doubtful good at any age, is absolutely destructive of the simplicity of childhood, this unnatural condition will soon pass away. It will help this object very much, if the child is sent on a visit to judicious friends, and change of scene, of pursuits, of playmates, and amusements ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... that by saying there was a large American colony in Paris, who had corrupted the French, and taught them our pernicious habit of introspection." ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... the river doubled sharply, rose the roofs of several ranch buildings—his father's ranch, the Lazy Y. Upon the buildings Calumet's army of memories descended and he forgot the desert, the long ride, the bleak days of his exile, as he yielded to solemn introspection. ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... was the same unconsciousness of individual merit, the same absence of introspection and analysis of motive, as there had been in her mother; but it seemed that their lives were pure and good, not merely from a lovely and beautiful nature, but from some law, the obedience to which was, of itself, harmonious ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... she was handsomer than any other woman on the train, and seemingly unaware of it as she leaned her elbow upon the dusty window-sill and gazed out in pensive introspection upon the bleak land where glaciers had trampled and volcanoes raged, each of them leaving its waste of ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... a kitten, solemn music. She is correspondingly volatile in the opposite direction and often laughs at real calamities with wonderful courage. She has a fund of romance in her nature which has led her to the pass she now is in. She is clever, too, at introspection and analysis—of herself chiefly. She studies her own sensations and dissects her moods. Her selfishness is of the peculiar sort which should have kept her from marrying until she found the hundredth man who could appreciate her genius and bend it into nobler channels. ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... Japan from the rest of the world, so conducive to introspection, has been highly favourable to the development of Teaism. Our home and habits, costume and cuisine, porcelain, lacquer, painting—our very literature—all have been subject to its influence. No student of Japanese culture ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... an order, and she saw five or six guerrillas rise out of the cacti and spring toward her. But the constant shadow of self-introspection haunted her even then. In her despair, and worse, in her disgust, feeling already those filthy hands upon her, she yet appraised this jewel among ecstatic shudders, and she knew in her heart that she would ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... there not be a more or less vague and evanescent sense of tension, and some psychic fact which may be regarded as the shadowy forerunner of the consciousness of the release of tension which, on a higher plane, reveals itself as the consciousness of will? There may be: introspection is not capable of answering the question, and one is forced to fall back upon an argument from analogy. Blindly impulsive action and action in which will indubitably and consciously plays a part are not wholly unlike, but they differ ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... properly graduated, I believe there are few people in these days who would not greatly benefit by a reduction in the number of meals and in the quantity of food they take. By means of a healthy and cheerful habit of introspection—not morbid and feverish—I am firmly convinced that by cutting down their meals most people would not only greatly improve their health, but their mental and spiritual condition as well, and also greatly increase their ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... would be noted, so likewise would those of dissolution. The first signs of decay—the teeth, the elasticity of body and mind—would provide a valuable sphere for all who are disposed to the diary-habit. The journals of individuals with a gift for introspection would furnish valuable material for psychologists in the future. Life would be cleansed in many ways. Journals would not have to be bowdlerized, like Marie Bashkirtseff's, for the morbidity that gloats on the forbidden would have ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the third blow Samuel put in several weeks at conscientious introspection. The blow years before at Andover had landed on his personal unpleasantness; the workman of his college days had jarred the snobbishness out of his system, and Marjorie's husband had given a severe jolt to his greedy selfishness. It threw women ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... in their culture. No pride is so great as the pride of intellect, and the Allertons never doubted that their neighbours were boors beside them. Whether it was due to the peculiar lie of the land on which they were born and bred, that led them to introspection, or whether it was due to some accident of inheritance, the Allertons had all an interest in the things of the mind, which had never troubled the Fletchers or the Garrods of Penda, the Daunceys or my lords Madden of Brise. They were as good sportsmen as the others, and ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... attributes of hers were what he needed to win him, to cheer him, to charm him, to guide him. He longed so to please her, to ingratiate himself with her, that he attempted to be light like her in his talk, but lapsed into abysmal absences and gloomy recesses of introspection. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... him in bed and unmistakably asleep when she went into the bedroom. Man-like, having got his way, he was not troubled by doubts or introspection. It was done. ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the eighteenth century. Mysticism is often mere delusion. In the last resort man has no other guide than his reason. It is his own reason that convinces him of the limitations of his reason. But those limitations are not to be overpassed by a visionary self-introspection, unless this, too, is subjected to rational criticism. Mysticism does its true part when it applies this criticism also to the current forms, conventions, and institutions. Conventions, forms, and institutions, ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... perhaps a mile along the bluff when Coaley began to toss up his head and perk his ears backward, turning now and then to look. Lance was sunk too deep in bitter introspection to observe these first warning movements which every horseman knows. He was thinking of Mary Hope, who would be waking now to a day of sorrowful excitement. Thinking, too, of old Aleck Douglas and the things that he had said in ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection. We look into our own bosoms, observe attentively every thing that passes there, anatomise our motives, trace step by step the operations of thought, and diligently remark the effects of external impulses ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... swelling prelude. There is defiant power in the first theme, and the constant reference to it betrays the composer's exasperated mental condition. This tendency to return upon himself, a tormenting introspection, certainly signifies a grave state. But consider the musical weight of the work, the recklessly bold outpourings of a mind almost distraught! There is no greater test for the poet-pianist than the F sharp minor Polonaise. It is profoundly ironical—what else means the introduction ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... The twinkle of humour which was in the baronet's did not reflect itself in the other's. Grell, too, was wondering whether he was fitted for domestic life. He had a taste for introspection, and was speculating how far the joyous girl who had confided her heart to his keeping would fit in with the scheme of things. He roused himself with an effort and glanced at his watch. ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... introspection of the processes in my own case, I came to the conclusion that it is certainly a combination of these two illusions that causes the overestimation of the short filled distances. In the case of the long distances, the underestimation of the filled space is, I think, again due to ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... spell or articulate. Thoughtful men are apt to misapply the advice, and betray their trust when they sit still and leave the "war of words to those who like it." When Carlyle condemned self-consciousness, a constant introspection and comparison of self with others, he theoretically struck at the root of the morbid moods of himself and other mental analysts; he had no intention to over-exalt mere muscularity or to deify athletic ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... down Broadway, Frederick, in his state of introspection and shame, looked blindly upon the houses as they glided by. Suddenly he started up from his crouching position. The sign of the Hoffman House had struck his eye and recalled the appointment the men on ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... offer any genuine comfort. Miss Earle has summarized with briefness and force the results of such training: "A frightened child, a retiring girl, a vacillating sweetheart, an unwilling bride, she became the mother of eight children; but always suffered from morbid introspection, and overwhelming fear of death and the future life, until at the age of thirty-five her father sadly wrote, 'God has delivered her now from all ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... versus Morbid Introspection." It helps wonderfully to be able to look at ourselves in an objective, impersonal way. We are likely to be overcome by emotion, or swept by vague longings which seem to have no meaning and which, just because they ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... turn of P.S. to hesitate in doubt; or at all events, so George Bross inferred from a sudden change in the expression of the little man's eyes. Momentarily they seemed to cloud, as if in introspection. But ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... the reader who studies his three books in chronological order. A Boy's Will, as befits a youth who has lived more in himself than in the world, is more introspective than either North of Boston or Mountain Interval; but this habit of introspection gave him both the method and the insight necessary for the accurate study of nature and neighbours. He discovered what other people were like, simply by looking into his own heart. And in A Boy's Will we find ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... redeemed and lifted from the dark and narrow life of self, into the life and light of the kingdom of God. Can we wonder, then, that the rejection of the Cross blasts our beliefs in everything divine and hopeful, and is accompanied everywhere by a "melancholy introspection and lack-lustre view of human life?" Recall then in this connection what I have said about sin, and the relation of Christ's death to the forgiveness of sin. What I am saying now does not include all that is implied in that ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... room and congenial employment, whether profitable to the State or not, and the labor should be induced, not enforced, and always timed and suited to their malady. A variety of interesting occupations tends to divert from delusional introspection. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... labor in the wilderness. Later, in 1653, came Marguerite Bourgeoys to the little colony beneath the mountain. She too, like Jeanne Mance, distrusted dreams and visions and mystic communings, cherishing a religion of good works rather than introspection of the soul. Dauversiere and Olier remained in France. Fortunately for Montreal, practical Christians, fighting soldiers of the cross, carried the ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... Christianity of this day—the all but entire absence of close inspection of one's own character and conduct. I know very well that it is not a wholesome thing for a man to be always poking in his own feelings and emotions. I know also that, in a former generation, there was far too much introspection, instead of looking to Jesus Christ and forgetting self. I do not believe that self-examination, directed to the discovery of reasons for trusting the sincerity of my own faith, is a good thing. But I do believe that, without the practice of careful ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... will tend to be and want to be and seek to be friendly to, and interested in, all sorts of people, and truthful and helpful and hating concealment. To be that with any approach to perfection demands an intricate and difficult effort, introspection to the hilt of one's power, a saving natural gift; one has to avoid pedantry, aggression, brutality, amiable tiresomeness—there are pitfalls on every side. The more one thinks about other people the more interesting and pleasing they are; I am all for kindly ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... cases in which men do not really believe, but rather believe they believe. It is not that they can truly conceive ten millions of special creations to have taken place, but that they think they can do so. Careful introspection will show them that they have never yet realized to themselves the creation of even one species. If they have formed a definite conception of the process, let them tell us how a new species is constructed, and how it makes its appearance. Is it thrown ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... the reaction should be especially sharp in Russia. The Slav peoples that form the great bulk of her population are notoriously sensitive. Shut up for nearly half the year by the rigours of winter, they naturally develop habits of brooding introspection or coarse animalism—witness the plaintive strains of their folk-songs, the pessimism that haunts their literature, and the dram-drinking habits of the peasantry. The Muscovite temperament and the Muscovite climate naturally lead to idealist ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... centres, these real beliefs and motives must be tracked down, and their humiliating character acknowledged. The ape and the tiger, in fact, are not dead in any one of us. In polite persons they are caged, which Is a very different thing: and a careful introspection will teach us to recognize their snarls and chatterings, their urgent requests for more mutton chops or bananas, under the many disguises which they assume—disguises which are not infrequently borrowed from ethics or from religion. Thus a primitive desire for revenge often masquerades as justice, ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... in his favour; chiefly, because of his attitude of entire frankness, a compliment to the girl. That he had been, in the strict sense of the word, open-hearted, it did not occur to him to doubt. Dyce Lashmar's introspection stopped at a certain point. He was still a very young man, and circumstance had never yet shown him an ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... quarters, drove out Austin's man, arranged his own fresh linen, took a sulky plunge; and, an unlighted cigarette between his teeth, completed his dressing in sullen introspection. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... banish the exhaustion, dissipate the fear. The fear—"And thy right hand shall show thee terrible things"—He was more often than once in situations in which he knew he was afraid and held fear away only because, with his old habit of introspection, he knew it for fear,—a horrible thing that sought mastery of him and by sheer force of mental detachment must be held away where it could be looked at and known for the vile thing it was. In such ordeals, in Flanders, he got the habit of saying to himself between his teeth, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... of the divine presence. For increase of years she made but little allowance, so that, whilst her love to God and heavenly meekness became increasingly apparent to others, her diminished energy was sometimes to herself the occasion of painful conflict and introspection."] Before I awoke I thought a letter was put into my hands, the contents of which were 'Through much tribulation ye shall enter the kingdom." The Lord giving me power, I will fight my passage through.—Through the intensity ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... that his last hour was filled with a profound consciousness of the isolation in which his soul had passed its mortal tarrying? Surrounded, worshipped, counting more intimate friends sincerely loved than any man of his time, gay, convivial, too active for many hours of introspection, no mortal could ever have stood more utterly alone than Hamilton. Whether or not the soul is given a sentient immortality we have no means of discovering, but the most commonplace being is aware ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... he to introspection or the matter of his own appearance. With one quick gesture he swept away the shrouding tangle of webs, spiders, and dead flies that obscured ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... abstinence.... If I cannot work, at least I need not lie." The doctrine of the supremacy of the individual to himself, of his originality and, as regards his own character, unique quality, must have had a great charm for people living in a society in which introspection, thanks to the want of other entertainment, played almost the part of a ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... whose judgment is exceedingly sound when their instincts are not in play, but who, in certain channels, when the senses are at riot, become puerile; the good ship, rudderless, which only rights itself when the storm has passed. They are men without the necessary leaven of introspection. Of themselves, in fact, they know nothing, learn nothing even in the remorse when the deed is done. For first of all, they are men of strength—men who can over-ride, with determination, rough-shod, the hampering results of ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... shutting out of terrors and of mysteries has brought at least the gain of concentration, so that we may discern unhindered the movements of the mind of man—of man, not rapt aloft in the vast ardours of speculation, nor involved in the solitary introspection of his own breast; but of man, civilized, actual, among his fellows, in the bright ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... anyone had asked him whether he actually hated it, he would have answered no. I suppose people almost always want something external to themselves, to reveal to them their own likes and dislikes. Our most assured likings have for the most part been arrived at neither by introspection nor by any process of conscious reasoning, but by the bounding forth of the heart to welcome the gospel proclaimed to it by another. We hear some say that such and such a thing is thus or thus, and in a moment the train that has been laid within ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... life, the continued introspection, coupled with the peculiar changes in the nutrition of the body at this time, render the nervous system peculiarly impressionable and liable to the manifold forms of diseases. 'The woman is told that she must be calm and patient, and in time the tomb-builder will ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... introspection than his uncle, but with a keener conscience and quicker observation, Richard had early remarked that, notwithstanding her assiduity in church-going, his mother did not seem the happier for her religion: there was a cloud, or seeming cloud, on her forehead—a something ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... and I have received news of you? This has been a source of great grief and pain to both of us, but it has not moved me to anger. It has rather caused me to devote such hours as I could spare from the preparation of my series of sermons on the miracle of Jonah to personal introspection, in the endeavour to discover, if possible, whether the cause of our estrangement lay in any defect ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... Superficially, introspection would have led her to believe that she would have been attracted by some one nearer to her own enthusiasms, her own breeding, her own ideals. This young man was alien to her in birth, and his education had been along totally different lines, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... the professor's scornful comments, he really had a humble and hopeless consciousness that if truth be visible to any human mind it was hidden from his. The possession of an ample fortune and the lack of family ties and active interests in life had fostered his tendency toward introspection till it became morbid. Now, at the age of thirty, he had no positive beliefs or aims, and felt the despairing self-contempt which inspired Hamlet's cry, "What should such fellows as I do, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... set down the story in his own words. It was broken with exclamations and involved with wandering sophistries and diatribes of self-blame. His mind had trampled upon itself in throes of introspection until it was often difficult to say which way the paths of the narrative really led. He had thought so much and acted so little that he travelled in a veritable bog of indecision. And yet, withal, some ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... and high desire, but it had deprived him of that rounded knowledge of actual life which alone, it would appear, teaches how to guide these forces into the more useful channels. Then as to capacity, he had the fine sensibilities of a poet, the facile introspection of the philosophical cast of mind, without the mental power to write good verse or to be a philosopher. He had, at least in youth, the conscience of a saint without the courage and endurance which appear necessary to heroism. In mockery the quality of ambition was bestowed ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... hour spent in the contemplation of the common end of all that live, in introspection and retrospection, who of us does not again take up the burdens of life with renewed resolutions to redouble our energies to faithfully discharge ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... I may be convinced—as I am—of the truth of my arguments, and however sure I may be that many others will not only agree with my conclusions, but will see that in "Introspection" rather than in "Intellectualism" lies the key to the Mystery, I do not wish to appear dogmatic in any of the suggestions contained in this volume; I am stating my own convictions, but at the same time I fully recognise ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... in mind before the antinomies of the universe, alert to see around a subject, having the modern thinker's inability to be partisan. This way of thought is obviously unhealthy, or at least has in it something of the morbid. It implies the undue introspection which is well-nigh the disease of this century. There is in it the failure to lose one's life in objective incident and action, that one may find it again in regained balance of mind and bodily health. Amiel had the defect of his quality; but he is clearly to be separated ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... appreciate, and towards which he would readily take an attitude of stout partisanship. The boy was deeply affected by these surroundings. "I was bred a Protestant," he said long afterwards, "and that strictly, too." Trained as he was in Puritan habits of introspection, he listened for the voice of God, and heard it. Thus the tone of his life was set. There were moments in his youth when "the world," as the phrase is, attracted him; there were times in his great career when he seemed, and ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... arising from the part it had to play. When one compares a healthy Pagan ritual—say of Apollo or Dionysus—including its rude and crude sacrifices if you like, but also including its whole-hearted spontaneity and dedication to the common life and welfare—with the morbid self-introspection of the Christian and the eternally recurring question "What shall I do to be saved?"—the comparison is not favorable to the latter. There is (at any rate in modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness about the Christian attitude, and also a painful ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and could never give satisfactory answers concerning the motives of their actions? In the end, however, though silently and secretly, he laughed also at himself: with his finer conscience and introspection, he found in himself the same difficulty and incapacity. "But why"—he said to himself—"should one on that account separate oneself from the instincts! One must set them right, and the reason ALSO—one must follow the instincts, but at the same time persuade the reason to support ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... instead of through the eye of a darning- needle. In the end MRS. FRED REYNOLDS tells us that "the day dawned. The whole earth sang and sparkled in the glad light of it," which is her way of saying that Margaret had found happiness. But all the same I fancy that introspection had become such a habit of this heroine that she is still likely to have days when the dawn is grey ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... of late years defined the abuse of their science as the morphology of common opinion. Contemporary investigators, they say, have been too much occupied with introspection; their labors have become merely physiologico-biographical, and they have greatly neglected the study of averages. For, says La Rochefoucauld, Il est plus ais de connotre lhomme en gnral que de connotre un homme en particulier; and on so ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... along, but had rather lost contact with and misinterpreted because of our preoccupation with describing and explaining it. Bergson's criticism of our intellectual methods turns simply upon a question of fact, to be settled by direct introspection. If, when we have freed ourselves from the preconceptions created by our normal common sense intellectual point of view, we find that what we know directly is a non-logical process of becoming, then we must admit that intellectual ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... on to endure. With the progress of his deafness his inability to cope with even the ordinary affairs of life increased, and this also had the effect of withdrawing him from the world. The spiritual insight gained by years of introspection, of communion with the higher part of his nature enabled him to discover truths hidden to the consciousness of the ordinary man. "That power of shaping the incomprehensible now grows with him; the ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... I wore an air Of pensive introspection, And then I curled down anywhere. They whispered of infection, And hoist me on two sticks as though I bore the leper's label, And took me where, all in a row Of tiny beds, two score or ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... almost with our own eyes how the invasion of America appears to the impecunious invader. It is thus "a human document" of considerable value, as well as a promissory note of future performance. The quick senses of the child, her keen powers of observation and introspection, her impressionability both to sensations and complex emotions—these are the very things out of which literature is made; the raw stuff of art. Her capacity to handle English—after so short a residence in ...
— From Plotzk to Boston • Mary Antin
... half-covering the figures; and when this was given up, the decorative women gave the unexpected impression of being deeply absorbed in something happening out of sight of the spectator below. An explanation which has gained some currency is that the figures represent "Introspection," ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... considered the problem of free will: here we found that the reasons for supposing volitions to be determined are strong but not conclusive, and we decided that even if volitions are mechanically determined, that is no reason for denying freedom in the sense revealed by introspection, or for supposing that mechanical events are not determined by volitions. The problem of free will versus determinism is therefore, if we were right, mainly illusory, but in part not yet capable of ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... And it gives me a little fun—about all I ever have, you know. Delia is having another season of introspection," she went on laughingly as Mrs. Marne entered the room and all three seated themselves at the table. "It has lasted two days already and I'm trembling with anxiety as to what will happen next. She was in such a brown study this morning ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... Such introspection, however, was no part of Dora's healthy temperament; and the next moment she had plunged into a talk upon farm-matters with her cousin, and displayed such shrewdness and clear-sighted wisdom upon the subject, that Capt. ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... Morbid introspection had become a part of the young man's pain. The study of the changes in himself proved more pleasant than painful. His mind swung between bitter depression, and warm, natural joy. His moments of deepest joy were coincident ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... who find ecstasy in vertigo, so thought, turning on itself, exhausted by the stress of introspection and tired of vain effort, falls terror-stricken. So it would seem that man must be a void and that by dint of delving unto himself he reaches the last turn of a spiral. There, as on the summits of mountains and at the bottom of mines, air fails, and ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... his back against the fence. Bracing his legs before him so as to serve as props, he thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and raising his eyes appealingly to the stars, ejaculated, "Proposed to, by Jove!" A period of profound introspection followed, and then he broke forth: "Well, I 'll be hanged!" emphasizing each word with a slow nod. Then he began to laugh,—not noisily; scarcely audibly, indeed; but with the deep, unctuous chuckle of one who gloats over some exquisitely absurd situation, some jest of ...
— A Love Story Reversed - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... to make. In a little while they are young men and women, and then men and women, save for a fresher vigour, like ourselves. For us it comes at last to fellowship and resignation. For them it comes at last to responsibility, to freedom, and to introspection and the searching of hearts. We must if we would be men-makers, as the first and immediate part of the business, correct and finish ourselves. The good New Republican must needs ask and ask repeatedly: What have I done and what am I doing with myself while I tamper with the lives of others? ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... were the questions which from day to day occupied her attention and filled her with interest. And therefore her own identity was not strong to her, as it is strong to those whose business permits them to look frequently into themselves, or whose occupations are of a nature to produce such introspection. If her head ached, or had she lamed her hand by any accident, she would think more of the injury to the household arising from her incapacity than of her own pain. It is so, reader, with your gardener, your groom, or your cook, if you will think of it. Till you tell them by your pity that ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... here was but ill-suited for one of Bunyan's morbid sensitiveness. For it was based upon a constant introspection and a scrupulous weighing of each word and action, with a torturing suspicion of its motive, which made a man's ever-varying spiritual feelings the standard of his state before God, instead of leading him off from self to the Saviour. It is not, therefore, at all surprising ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... constant introspection which is found in Cecil Forester's nervous hero, "Captain Horatio Hornblower." That man doubtless would have died of stomach ulcers before winning his second stripe. It is not a matter of, "How do ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... time for introspection in the Army, and especially when one engages in a tilt with an R.T.O. The R.T.O. has been glorified by an imaginative soul with the title of "Royal Transportation Officer." As a matter of fact, the "R" does not stand ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... intended in order to have a chance of passing him in his chair and scrutinising again the features that masked such depravity. For that they masked it cannot be denied. A physiognomist looking at him would have conceded a certain gloom, a trend towards introspection, possibly a hypertrophied love of self, but no more. Physiognomists, however, can retire from the case, for they are as often wrong as hand-writing experts. And if any Lavater had been on board and had advanced such a theory he would have been as unpopular ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... old home at Port Huron, Edison had a place of his own to work in, to think in; but no one in any way acquainted with Newark as a swarming centre of miscellaneous and multitudinous industries would recommend it as a cloistered retreat for brooding reverie and introspection, favorable to creative effort. Some people revel in surroundings of hustle and bustle, and find therein no hindrance to great accomplishment. The electrical genius of Newark is Edward Weston, who has thriven amid its turmoil and there has developed his beautiful ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... animalism, under increasing control as it rises, still with the ferocity, rapacity and selfish passions of the gloomy mass at the bottom and forever in revolt. Is this not proved by history, written and unwritten? Is it not proved by the ghastly secrets of individual introspection that men never reveal or admit to others; secrets guarded by a system of conventions so impenetrable and vast that to attempt to personalize it in the sneaking figure of Hypocrisy would be as absurd as to try to enlarge the significance of an ivory chessman by setting it up on a lady's jewel ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... biologically. These characteristics manifest themselves in a genial, sunny and social disposition, in an interest and attachment to external, physical things rather than to subjective states and objects of introspection; in a disposition for expression rather than enterprise and action. The changes which have taken place in the manifestations of this temperament have been actuated by an inherent and natural impulse, characteristic ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... causing them to think Beauty! An awkward word—a perpetual begging of the question Certainty Death may be the end of man, or Death may be nothing Everything is worth the doing well Freedom from the dull tedium of responsibility Introspection causes discomfort It is not my profession to know things for certain Itch to get outside ourselves Know things for certain Lost all the good of the old, and given us nothing in its place Replaces within me interest ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... of intellect and wit which the French call ESPRIT. They had also, in superlative measure, the social gifts which women of genius reared in the library or apart from the world, are apt to lack. The close study of books leads to a knowledge of man rather than of men. It tends toward habits of introspection which are fatal to the clear and swift vision required for successful leadership of any sort. Social talent is distinct, and implies a happy poise of character and intellect; the delicate blending of many gifts, not the supremacy of one. It implies taste and versatility, with ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... midnight with a carol or appropriate hymn, and this custom is especially held by the Wesleyan Methodists in their "Watch Night," when they pray, etc., till about five minutes to twelve, when there is a dead silence, supposed to be spent in introspection, which lasts until the clock strikes, and then they burst forth with a ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... us. The daily habit of balancing and introspection enables a man to read and analyse his own heart, its strength and weakness. He becomes familiar with the springs and levers that move it, the storms that convulse and the sunshine that gladdens the mysterious world within his own breast. How useful this knowledge when he comes ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... manner; it cut him off from Nature, for he could see nothing of her; it cut him off from man, for he could not have seen even a legion of soldiers had they surrounded him. This removal of outside influences threw him back upon himself, and delivered him to introspection; he began for the hundredth time to weigh his position, to consider whether the momentous step that he was taking was necessary to his ease of mind, was right, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... foreman suddenly halted and stared out over the lower ranch buildings at the distant pastures. Tresler was slightly behind him as he stood, and only had a sight of the man's profile. He did not seem to be looking at any particular object. His attitude was one of thoughtful introspection. Tresler waited. Things were turning out better than he had hoped, and he had no wish but to let the arbiter of the situation take his own way. He began to think that, whatever Jake's ulterior object might be, he was in ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... of increase, and we shared insensibly from being connected with that growth. In retrospect now, and giving due recognition to this crescent spirit, I recall that, in spite of it, Omar Khayyam was the favorite poet of many of us, that introspection, which sometimes deepened into pessimism, was in vogue, and that a spiritual or philosophic languorous disenchantment sicklied o'er the somewhat mottled cast of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... age and his society. He was born of Cynicism and of Introspection. It would have interested him quite as much to find out himself as to find out any other person. While he was moving along in the darkness it occurred to him to remember that he did not know in the least whither, to what rescue, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... which must always be checked and stunted in this fashion? What kind of salvation can there be that can only be purchased by the sacrifice of so much that is noble and inspiring? True life consists in experience, not in introspection; in going out from self into the world, not in retiring from the world inwards. Let us therefore live our life without fear, lose ourselves in humanity, forget self in experience, and leave ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson |
