"Introspection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... embarrassed—vaguely uneasy. The memory of Rice's words came flooding back to him. Whatever else was true, this man's sufferings were real indeed. To him she had never been anything but a most charming benefactor. In a momentary fit of introspection he told himself, then, that her sex ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... themselves—as St. Paul did—of a surplusage of merits of some sort, when registering the barometer and the thermometer of their religious experience were the most unrelenting self-accusers. It is safe to say, as a general thing, that those who in that introspection, in the measurement of their heats and chills of piety, grieved most deeply and found the most ingenious causes for self-infliction were either the most calculating hypocrites or the most truly godly. To which of the two classes any one particular individual might belong could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... great epic. Her father had said the epic was a thing of the past, that in the future none would be written, for that it was a form of expressions that belonged to the world's youth, and that age brought philosophy and introspection, but not epics. ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... a fine piece of introspection. A translation by Mrs. Humphry Ward is published in 2 volumes by the Macmillans. De Senancour's Obermann, translated by A. E. Waite (Wellby), should ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... 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 ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... sympathy for others, not of one expiring in unsatisfied yearnings for the sympathy of others for herself, and in moonstruck subjective aspirations. The women who wept over her romance read in it the lesson of duty, not of whimpering introspection. The danger lay in the mischievous intellectual direction which Rousseau imparted to ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... contends in this fine book, that reforms are not reforms at all, rather the same things dressed up in other clothes. Values are set up on false standards. Women in trying to become emancipated are likely to become slaves; the fear of the past is given over to a too delicate introspection of the probable vices and virtues of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... with the pale cast of thought,' the nineteenth of that ilk mouches along, soliloquising about more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in any of its predecessors' philosophies. Ah me! Analysis is paralysis and introspection is vivisection and culture drives one mad. What will be ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... by jumbling together snatches of the songs of the other birds in a sort of potpourri; or perhaps he will be scolding or arguing with an imaginary foe, then dropping his voice and talking confidentially to himself. Suddenly he bursts into a charming, simple little song, as if the introspection had given him reason for real joy. All these vocal accomplishments suggest the chat at once; but the minute your intrusion is discovered the sharp scolding, that is fairly screamed at you from an enraged little throat, leaves no possible shadow of a doubt as to the bird you have disturbed. ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... seeking 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 ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... 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, ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... imagination to perceive, at a glance, the attributes that go toward the making of a Man, only think they love and delay a conventional period before yielding. But Donna Corblay had lived so long in sordid, unimaginative, unromantic San Pasqual that, from much inhibition and introspection, she was different from most women. She had grown to rely on herself, to trust her own judgment and to bank on first impressions. As she faced Bob McGraw now, her first impression was that he was telling her with his eyes that he loved ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... 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, to what danger, he was steering. He might, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... reverted to their exotic phase of his awakening, drifting into such introspection as he seldom indulged, and led him far from the immediate riddle, by strange ways to a revelation altogether unpresaged and a resolve ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 self-consciousness, which is not pleasant; and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... under an illusion. This is one of the many 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 ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... domestic felicity or 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 given hostages to fortune by marrying at the age of eighteen, steadied by the responsibility ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... shyness; considerateness for others; personal appearance; G. W. Curtis's reminiscence of; his simplicity of habits; love of books; abstraction; moral enthusiasm of, characterized; unsuspiciousness of; introspection of, how exaggerated; distaste for society, how explainable; in what greater than Irving; ghostly atmosphere of; humor of; American quality of; effect of civil war upon; death of; his grave; burial; literary and intellectual influence of Heine, Heinrich ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... young love of Romeo and Juliet or the voluptuous abandonment of Antony and Cleopatra, the intellect of Iago irresistibly impelled to malignant activity or Hamlet entangled in the coils of a fatal introspection. To the sheer poetry of Shakespeare he is also acutely sensitive, to the soft moonlit atmosphere of the "Midsummernight's Dream," to the tender gloom of "Cymbeline," to the "philosophic poetry" of "As You Like It." Some ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... fell to moralizing. He was not often given to that, or introspection. Longing and alternate hope and despair had been his comrades and bedfellows, but he rarely indulged in calm consideration. Smoking his pipe, stretched wearily on the moss, he wondered if men knew how much they punished while fulfilling their ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... from his unaccustomed reverie; Adrien Leroy, the popular idol of fashionable society, was not given long to introspection. ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... victories over vicious horses, wild beasts, or savage Indians. When the fire has burnt low and become a mass of glowing coals, voices are hushed, the camp is still, and each, half hypnotized by gazing into the weirdly shifting lights of the dying embers, is wrapped in introspection. Then, rousing, you lie down, your canopy the dark blue vault of the heavens, your mattress the soft, curling buffalo grass. After a night of deep refreshing sleep you spring at dawn with every faculty ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... 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 ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... I know not how, polite society was haunted by the obstinate fiction that it was the duty of a man of parts to express himself from time to time in verse. Any special occasion of expansion or exuberance, of depression, torsion, or introspection, was sufficient to call it forth. So we have poems of dejection, of reflection, of ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... 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. Karl laughingly exclaimed, ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... the race, 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 relation; but see in it what I have just ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... world attends the motive-power of any action. Infinite perspectives of mental mirrors reflect the whys of all doing. An adult with long practice in analytic introspection soon becomes bewildered when he strives to evolve the primary and fundamental reasons for his deeds; a child so striving would be lost in unexpected depths; but a child never strives. A child obeys unquestioningly and absolutely ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 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, crawling between ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... a few for the sake of the experiment), there is no inspecting augur who could divine therefrom our literary future. The diverse indications would puzzle the most acute dissector. Lost in the variety, the multiplicity of minute details, the refinements of analysis and introspection, he would miss any leading indications. For with all its variety, it seems to me that one characteristic of recent fiction is its narrowness—narrowness of vision and of treatment. It deals with lives rather than with life. Lacking ideality, it fails of broad perception. We are accustomed to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 1910.) He had simply opened his lucky and wise mouth at the proper moment, and the money, like ripe, golden fruit, had fallen into it, a gift from benign heaven, surely a cause for happiness! And yet—he did not feel so jolly! He was surprised, he was even a little hurt, to discover by introspection that monetary gain was not necessarily accompanied by felicity. Nevertheless, this very successful man of the world of the Five Towns, having been born on the 27th of May 1867, had reached the age of ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... convinced me that it is a much easier matter than I had anticipated to obtain trustworthy replies to psychological questions. Many persons, especially women and intelligent children, take pleasure in introspection, and strive their very best to explain their mental processes. I think that a delight in self-dissection must be a strong ingredient in the pleasure that many are said to take ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... need of self-analysis so far as his physical state was concerned. Just so far as a man obeys higher laws as a matter of course, and uses every mistake to enable him to know the laws better, is morbid introspection out of the question ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... did not die in childhood as she feared, but lived to pass through many gloomy hours of morbid introspection and of overwhelming fear of death, to marry and become the mother of eight children; but was always buffeted with fears and tormented with doubts, which she despairingly communicated to her solemn and far from comforting father; and at last she faced the dread foe Death at the age of thirty-five. ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... 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 the window. Out ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... if he were too feeble to get any farther, he stopped and leaned 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 ...
— A Love Story Reversed - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... future. The dazzle had endured until his mother's words had fallen on his ears. Then it had eclipsed itself, leaving him to wonder whether, after all, it had not been the ignis fatuus of self-elation, and not the steady glow of truth. Scott Brenton was not much more given to introspection, at that epoch of his life, than is any other healthy youngster of nineteen. None the less, he ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... however, little 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" ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... was the primitive condition of men. Of course it may have been. But if not, there is work to be done in endeavouring to ascertain what lies behind it. The questions started from this point wander across the border of folklore into pure psychology; but it is a psychology based not upon introspection and analysis of the mind of the civilized man, developed under the complex influences that have been acting and reacting during untold years of upward struggling, always arduous and often cruel, but a psychology which must be painfully reconstructed ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... vivid colors as possible, in the hope that I may do something to defend the weak from the strong. People never dream of all that is going on in the little heads of the young, for few adults are given to introspection, and those who are incapable of recalling their own feelings under restraint and disappointment can have no appreciation of the sufferings of children who can neither describe nor analyze what they feel. In defending themselves ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... 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 ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... myself I sometimes turn My gaze, with introspection stern, Three persons there I seem to see, "I" and "Myself," ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... forgotten her. He 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, ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... 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, after all, represent the corporate wisdom, the accumulated experiences ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... 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
... with philosophy, we muse on these withholden glories, as we drive rapidly homeward. Umbrellas shut off the scenery where the mists do not, and we are forced to introspection. We resort for comfort to praising each other for bearing the disappointment so well. We laud each other's cheerfulness under ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... Rodrigo bellowing forth 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 not have ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... scarcely left Wade's bedside, for to her mother now fell the burdens of the ranch household. From feeling that she never would be equal to the task of caring for so many people, Mrs. Purnell came to find her health greatly improved by her duties, which left her no opportunity for morbid introspection. ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... priori, the connection between the two is not far to seek. Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self, induces one to take an interest in others. Introspection tends to make of man a solitary animal, the absence of it a social one. The more impersonal the people, the more will the community supplant the individual in the popular estimation. The type becomes the interesting thing to man, as it always is to nature. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... of which each of us is a part only. The old process which says 'I think, therefore I am,' has its fallacy in the statement, 'I think.' It assumes that that assertion is axiomatic and basic, when in reality it is the conclusion derived from a long process of mental introspection. It is a theory rather than ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... man, and perhaps for the children, but not for the woman. Her work is done alone, and at the time her husband comes home and wants to stay there, she would like to get out. Work that is in the main lonely, and work that on the whole leaves the mind free, leads almost inevitably to daydreaming and introspection. These are essentials, in the housework,—monotony, daydreaming, ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... 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 ideas, by constant attrition, had acquired a really striking ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... 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
... us all live busy and positive lives. Brooding is not a wholesome occupation for anybody at any time, but, on the other hand, through hours of active effort emotion finds an outlet and our natures are restored to peace. Introspection is to many people an actual luxury, but like other luxuries it enervates. Reveling in their own emotions is a favorite hobby with quite a lot of people, but for all that it is a very bad one. There really should be no time for it. Our emotions are all needed as driving ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... there was always something doing. Fasts, feasts, flowers, sweetmeats, lights, candles, little journeys, visits, calls, dances, prayers, responses, wails, cries of exultation, shouts of triumph—"Rejoicing of the Law"—these prevented monotony, stagnation and introspection. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 wide a subject ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... young person; she was not given to introspection. She never took herself to pieces, in a morbid way, to examine the inner workings of her own mind, after the manner of some folk, who regulate themselves in a bungling fashion, and wind themselves up afresh daily; and who would ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... himself (enough cases (355) were given to make a reasonable allowance for individual variations); (2) they indicate the general prevalence of the emotion during childhood; (3) they reinforce observation in the same way that introspection always reinforces the objective method of study. In estimating the value of these confessions one must be mindful of the common defect of most auto-biographical statements, viz., that they are influenced by the almost irresistible tendency to write ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... .539.[107] In athletic power the coefficient was still higher, .72 between brothers, .75 between sisters and .49 between brothers and sisters. Measurements of mental characteristics—vivacity, assertiveness, introspection, popularity, conscientiousness, temper, ability and handwriting proved to be as easily correlated, the mean coefficients being; brothers, .52, sisters .51, ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... Dock there was certainly no time for remorse, introspection, repentance, or any phenomena of inner life either for the captive ships or for their officers. From six in the morning till six at night the hard labour of the prison-house, which rewards the valiance of ships that win the harbour went on steadily, great slings of general ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... from Winfield. They write both prose and verse and Mrs. Henthorne was a reporter for years. Mrs. Bellman, when a girl, lived five years on a cattle ranch and to those five lonely years she credits her habit of introspection, meditation and writing. Much of her poetry and short stories are used in ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... hours afterwards he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor of fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious introspection. It was a base thing which he had done—it was also a strange thing psychologically; and at intervals he tried to understand it, to track it to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... who had been reared in such isolation as she,—whose intellect, naturally subject to her affection, had become more so through the absence of systematic education,—whose morality had been allowed to be merely one of instinct,—to whom introspection had been till now a thing unknown,—and who, accepting a husband as another child accepts a parent, had, in the whirl of gay life where she afterward reigned, found so little time for thought, and remained in such mental unsophistication ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... was not given to introspection, and so the disturbing question left him almost as readily as it had come. When one attempted to think things out, there was no hope of escaping the endless circle with a clear head. No, he wasn't analytical, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... everywhere and knew everything, but as to his past he said nothing. Nobody knew anything about his people and yet everybody trusted him, indeed no man in the Army had been in receipt of more confidences. Perhaps it was his innate feeling, his deep sense of introspection. And he knew by a kind of instinct that the beautiful girl by his ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... reminiscences, which are published under the title of "Retrospection and Introspection," much is told of herself in detail that can only be touched upon ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... a mercurial temperament and a strong sense of the ludicrous. Though my physique is slight, my health has always been excellent. Of late years especially I have been greatly given to introspection and self-scrutiny, but have never had any hallucinations, mental delusions, nor hysterics, and am not at all superstitious. Spiritualistic manifestations, hypnotic dabblings, and the other psychical fads of the day ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a value to introspection as to observation in psychology, and said that whatever place is assigned to the one in scientific method must be assigned to the other. He therefore accorded a high value to imagination and intuition, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... pleasant talkers, but not impertinently sad, nor ever sullen,—that we all loved him a little more at such times. The ill-health from which he always suffered, and a flower-like delicacy of temperament, the yearning desire to be of some service in the world, coupled with the curious, critical introspection which marks every sensitive and refined nature and paralyzes action, overcast his life and manner to the common eye with pensiveness and even sternness. He wrote verses in which his heart seems to exhale in a sigh of sadness. But he was not in the least a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Introspection, however, was alien to his being; he was made for the camp rather than the study; his critical powers, if turned in for a time on himself, quickly swung back to work upon men and affairs; and they found the needed exercise in organizing his Liliputian Empire and surveying ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... 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 ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... him to try to sleep. To and fro he paced in the starlight. Alone now, with the urgent activities past for the time, he reverted to the grim and hateful introspection that had haunted ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... off green and unripe," said Kent, his railing mood changing to one of sad introspection, "than to prematurely fall, from a worm gnawing at ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... psychological knowledge, but the science has been chiefly used to explain the methods by which we obtain knowledge of the outer world in relation to ourselves. When a philosopher centres self on self, in order to know self as a result of introspection, the results have been disastrous, and have contributed nothing to knowledge, properly so-called. If religious self-examination has its dangers, so also has philosophical self-analysis for its own sake. ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... victims of evanescent illusions, that they abandon themselves, at times, to quite impossible and romantic dreams, I should be wise to stand aside. I felt that, after all, Miss Fraenkel's crystal-clear bromidity would be a delightful change after so much intense living and introspection. For that evening, after dinner, as I listened to the music of the Steersman's Song from the Flying Dutchman, it seemed only too likely that even after all these years, so deathless is passion in some hearts, the skilled hand of Frank Carville might set a woman's ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... cogitation, revery, musing, meditation, consideration, abstraction, imagination, brown study, contemplation, deliberation, introspection, retrospection, lucubration, rumination, preoccupation, excogitation; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... work like worry. If you are given to introspection and worry, and allow these things to go unchecked, they become habits with you, and while your sleep, in a measure, is an antidote for worry, yet the more worry you have the less soundly you will sleep, and consequently ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... had been shorn of trees. It was of gray stone, massive and forbidding 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 ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... OTHER WRITINGS One volume, containing Unity of Good, Rudimental Divine Science, No and Yes, Retrospection and Introspection; uniform in style with the pocket edition of Science and Health. Morocco, limp, round corners, gilt edges, heavy Oxford India Bible paper, single copy $3.50; six or more, each $3.26. Library edition, cloth, marbled edges, single copy $2.00; ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker G. Eddy
... reflect. Hamlet seems meant to show how vain it is to be merely a philosopher in this world. Hamlet is always pondering, thinking of the abstract rights and wrongs of the case. In the result, though he does eventually avenge his father's murder, his introspection and vacillation have led to the death of himself and no fewer than three other innocent persons—Ophelia, Polonius and Laertes. Yet Hamlet was at least twice as brainy as the rest of them, and he was also ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... brethren—with the added reflection that it would be a personal triumph for himself into the bargain. He was ashamed of this feeling a little later, and of his trick with the sermon. But this chastening product of introspection was all the fruit which the incident bore. The ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... that you think yourself as proud as the devil, you do not think yourself to be very humble' (iv. 282). That is a characteristic bit of subtilising, and it indicates the danger of all this excessive introspection. Edwards would not have accepted the moral that the best plan is to think about yourself as little as possible; for from his point of view this constant cross-examination of all your feelings, this dissection of emotion down to its finest and most intricate convolutions, was of the very essence ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... her, wondered for half a moment whether Mr. Beck were the object of this apparently unrequited sentiment; then, with a queer start of introspection, abruptly decided that, no, he certainly was not. But then—but then—. Well, there was no use in following up such conjectures.... He turned home-ward, wondering if the picnickers had already ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... paint in rosy colors the dreamy hermit-life at Eisfeld. Now, however, after his return, he became keenly conscious of the pettiness and inadequacy of his surroundings and of the lack of well-defined purpose in his life thus far. It was during this period of introspection and doubt that he finally decided to devote himself to a literary career. He took up the study of English, plunged into Shakespeare and Goethe, and worked assiduously on a number of dramatic and novelistic ventures. In 1843 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... will" from the orthodox side failed to win from the monophysites the expected concession of "two natures." The monophysites were quite consistent here. To deny will of nature is an elementary mistake in psychology. Only a tyro in introspection will ascribe will directly to personality. A one-willed two-natured personality is little short of a psychological monstrosity. An attempt to rally Christendom round such a figure was bound to fail. The only lasting result of the emperor's ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... self-perpetuating principle which appears to insure perennial growth of the poet's egoism. The mystery of inspiration breeds introspection; introspection breeds egoism; egoism breeds pride; pride breeds contempt for other men; contempt for other men breeds hostility and persecution; persecution breeds proud isolation. Finally, isolation breeds deeper introspection, and the poet is ready to start on a second ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... house was not quite livable without him. Mr. Starkweather was swept by an emotion which took him wholly by surprise and almost overcame him; he sat up, and began to wonder where he could find some occupation which would chink up the crevices in his thoughts, and prevent him from introspection. Eventually he hit upon it, and with a conscious effort, he pulled himself out of his chair, and went over to Masonic Hall to ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... cry against introspection and an insistence that it is necessarily morbid, which works in direct opposition to true self-control. Introspection for its own sake is self-centred and morbid, but we might as well assert that it is right to have dirty hands so long as we wear gloves, and that ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... quoted to show that Hoelderlin's mind was intensely introspective. This is true also of Lenau, even to a greater extent, and may be taken as generally characteristic of poets of this type. The fact that this introspection is an inevitable symptom in many mental derangements, hypochondria, melancholia and others, indicates a not very remote relation of Weltschmerz to insanity. In Hoelderlin's poems there are not a few premonitions of the sad fate which ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... office, then located at Cambridge, and we well knew work of that sort required brains of the best. Since Simon Newcomb's death an interesting story has been told about his heredity. His strong-brained father, measuring his own qualities with rigid introspection, discovering where he was weak and where capable resolved that whatever wife he chose should supplement in her personality the points to which he lacked. He would father sons and daughters who should come ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... Clapham, in 1861. A fiery young poet, she burdened her own intensity with the sorrows of her race. She wrote one novel, Reuben Sachs, and two volumes of poetry—the more distinctive of the two being half-pathetically and half-ironically entitled A Minor Poet (1884). After several years of brooding introspection, she committed suicide in 1889 at the age ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... no introspection. She had suffered too much in the past not to quaff eagerly of the goblet when it was full and ask for nothing more. If she paused to realize how dependent she had become on the constant society of Langdon Masters and that literature was now no more ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... 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 revival ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... and religious literature figures as a sharply defined and easily recognizable "faculty," like "will" or "reason." But this classification, though useful, is misleading by its simplicity. If we observe by introspection what goes on in our minds when we "will" or "reason" or "listen to conscience," we shall find all sorts of emotions, ideas, impulses, surging back and forth, altering from moment to moment, never twice the same. At another period of our lives, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... little help from self-introspection or self-examination. Thus he writes in one of the letters given later on: 'I am not sure that we cannot learn more about others than we can about ourselves. {29} I never think it is profitable to ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... events he was nevertheless ever keen and alert concerning them. Then the winter of 1797 appears to have been very severe. His enforced confinement to home probably gave rise to an introspection, and a slight disappointment in matters which had formerly given him pleasure. For example, he puzzled over the fact that on his second visit to Philadelphia, Mr. Adams was present but once at his lectures, ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... mighty iron fabric. I followed in his wake. At first the thought did not occur to me, but after all was over it struck me that this act was somewhat appropriate to the day. The great Thunderer had, as it were, gone into a condition of introspection. ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... soft golden hair which had fallen a little over her face, brightening its sorrow. Every feature quivered under the invisible cutting hand of cruel experience. In those last sharp moments of introspection she had gained such a knowledge of suffering that a fire seemed to have consumed her vision of life, reducing it to a frightful desert of eternal woe and unavailing sacrifice. Partially stunned, and partially blinded by ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... animation quite unsuitable to a conscientious valet. He gave the impression of a man who does not depend on idle rumour for his facts. His eye gleamed unprofessionally for a moment before resuming its habitual expression of quiet introspection. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... quality he has which no Irishman was ever without—pugnacity; and that is certainly a great virtue, especially in the present age. But he has not the tenacity of conviction which goes with the fighting spirit in a man like Bernard Shaw. His weakness of introspection and selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent him fighting; but they will always prevent ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... no cause for shame in it; but her heart was suddenly illuminated by a flash of introspection. She became painfully conscious how much Pierre Philibert had occupied her thoughts for years, and now all at once she knew he was a man, and a great and noble one. She was thoroughly perplexed and half angry. She questioned ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... outward appearance of tears and of pallor; when we have the outward appearance of the fiery eyes and short breath, we have simultaneously the inward feeling of anger. Thus body is mind observed outwardly in its relation to the senses; mind is body inwardly experienced in its relation to introspection. Who can draw a strict line of demarcation between mind and body? We should admit, so far as our present knowledge is concerned, that mind, the intangible, has been formed to don a garment of matter in order to become an intelligible existence at all; matter, the solid, ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... spirit travels in its interrogations of Nature! We should say there was more of what there is of essential in metaphysics, more of the structural action of the human mind, in his books, than in the concerted introspection of all the psychologists. One sees very well that a new astronomy was predicted in the build of that sky-confronting mind; for harmonic ratios, laws, and rhymes played in his spheral soul, galaxies and gravitations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... through to Forstadt. I was received at the railway station by a large and distinguished company. My mother was at Artenberg, where I was to join her that evening, but Hammerfeldt awaited me, and some of the gentlemen attached to the Court. I was too much given to introspection and self-appraisement not to be aware that my experiences had given me a lift toward manhood; my shyness was smothered, though not killed, by a kind of mechanical ease born of practice. After greeting Hammerfeldt I received the welcome of the company with a composed courtesy of which the ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... under-layers of his mental processes all the time his upper crust had busied itself with rehearsals of "Beyond the Alps lies Italy" and the determination of Hamlet's madness. But now was no time for introspection, and he set himself the task of solving the new mystery. As Fran merged from the mouth of the alley, Abbott dived into its bowels, but when he reached the next street, no ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... of pessimism, the metaphysical form was, for a historian, the least enticing. Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection, and the more, because — as Mephistopheles said of Marguerite — he was not the first. Nearly all the highest intelligence known to history had drowned itself in the reflection of its own thought, and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... de Bernieres. St. Vincent de Paul, who had trained M. Olier, was desirous also that his pupil, before going to find a field for his apostolic zeal among the people of Auvergne, should prepare himself by earnest meditation in retirement at St. Lazare. "Silence and introspection seemed to St. Vincent," says M. de Lanjuere, the author of the life of M. Olier, "the first conditions of success, preceding any serious enterprise. He had not learned this from Pythagoras or the ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... 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
... opening is very impressive, the nerve-pulp being harassed by the gradually 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 ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... scholarship, accustomed to depend upon himself alone, to live only with himself, merely lived by himself and for himself. An egotistic philosopher given to analysis of the soul, voluptuously immersed in his introspection like a big cat curled up in a ball, he was not moved at all by the agitation of the others. These three friends of his who never could agree among themselves he put in the same bag—with the "populars." ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... sunshine and the violets opening on southern slopes—so when reason and memory, the janitors of the mind, first admitted the light of consciousness, only the obscure outline of miserable feelings and repulsive events were manifest to Haldane's introspection. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... emotion of which he was ignorant—this compelling impulse that entered into a man driving him beyond the power of endurance? It was past his comprehension. And he wondered suddenly for the first time why he had been made so different to the generality of men. But introspection was foreign to him, he had not been in the habit of dissecting his own personality and his thoughts turned quickly with greater interest to the man who sat near him plunged like himself into silent reverie. And as he looked he scowled with angry ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... he received 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 ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... confessed then that he missed the happy company of the girls. He did not distinguish Helen from Bo in his slow introspection. When he sought his bed he did not at once fall to sleep. Always, after a few moments of wakefulness, while the silence settled down or the wind moaned through the pines, he had fallen asleep. This ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... 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
... him in that half-waiting attitude. There was little introspection, or analysis, in those days; people simply lived, felt without understanding. She had outgrown her first feeling of aversion. In a vague fashion she realized that miladi needed protection and care that no one but M. Destournier could give her. She was sorry she could not ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... in the mind of Ida Locke which had prompted her to write in that red-covered note-book just what she had written. No one would have guessed the secret strain of introspection in her, nor guessed the impulse which led her to put into writing her hidden life. Unless, indeed, that introspection and that impulse are always part of the intuitions of love—yielded to or not, as may be. The entries were scattered—as ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... speaking 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
... money because of the undoubted influence of mind in causing and in removing those ailments that originate in fear, imagination, or morbid introspection. A few years ago a little out-of-the-way town in southern Minnesota was visited by train loads of the sick and crippled from miles around. Miraculous cures were heralded broadcast. Life-long cripples left wagon loads of crutches and braces to decorate the little church with the ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... remember this is only my second visit, and I have not made much way with her. She is in a state of bodily and mental discomfort very painful to witness. If I am not mistaken, she is driving herself half-crazy with introspection and self-will. You must not give way to this morbid desire to increase her own wretchedness. She needs firmness ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... action took place "off." But they had a strong and abiding influence on the popular stage; they gave it its ghosts, its supernatural warnings, its conception of nemesis and revenge, they gave it its love of introspection and the long passages in which introspection, description or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue, holds up the action; contradictorily enough they gave it something at least of its melodrama. Perhaps they helped to enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a dramatist's proper ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... point that must not be overlooked. It needs no subtle introspection to assure us that we, the audience, do our own little bit of acting, and instinctively place ourselves at the point of view of a spectator before whose eyes the drama is unrolling itself for the first time. If the play has any richness of texture, we have many sensations that ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... rippled, for it was like the even voice of waters, 'your love of nature, the boundlessness of your kindness, the daring of your speculation, the profoundness of your introspection, have made you one of us. Awake, and hear ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... nature, her starting-point? Her introspection was not very reassuring. She felt that perhaps the most hopeful indication was her strong rebound from what she at last recognized as mean and unworthy. She also had a little natural curiosity and vanity to see if her face was ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... 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 hymn of ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... possesses, or appears to possess, formulae to meet all possible emergencies, and consequently brings with it a happiness that is genuine, though superficial. But this customary belief rarely satisfies for long. Contact with the world brings to light other and opposed theories: introspection and independent investigation of the bases of the hereditary faith are commenced; many doctrines that have been hitherto accepted as eternally and indisputably true are found to rest upon but slight foundation, ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... were empty, as if the brain had ceased to act, and all vitality was driven back on the heart, which swells to choking; when it seems, in the spiritual sense, that as energy returns so far as to allow of self-command once more, of introspection, we peer down in appalling silence into ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans |
