#introspection

But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too? ↗

— Robertson Davies

#exploration #freud #heroism #introspection #jung

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age. ↗

— John Gardner

#introspection #age

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#introspection #uncertainty #poets

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is. ↗

— C.G. Jung

#individuality #introspection #psychology #consciousness

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#writing #introspection

Thurough examination will do the healthy no harm, and it may bless the sick. ↗

— Charles H. Spurgeon

#introspection #life

I'm not used to introspection. I've never lingered on my feelings. The show must go on. ↗

— Brenda Lee

#go #i #introspection #lingered #must

She wrote that she, too, always felt an outsider "...even to myself. ↗

— Will Weaver

#introspection

…there is not a day of my life that I am not critiquing myself to see if my politics are borne out in the way that I live and the way that I talk and present myself. ↗

— Bell Hooks

#politics #life

I'm sorry," Leo murmured and then seemed to look through Martin for a few seconds before he returned his gaze to him. "Although if it's any comfort - and please don't take this the wrong way, because I speak from my own perspective, which I understand often places me far outside of the norm - I sometimes like to think that death, at least in the case of those we truly love, allows us to appreciate what they have done for us in ways that are not possible when we're all here, constantly changing and fixated on how to get from one day to the next. Death offers us the chance to reflect on who they were, which of course is a way to understand ourselves. As painful as it can be to see them go - and I don't mean to diminish the sense of loss or grief we all feel - there is also no greater gift. ↗

— Matthew Gallaway

#introspection #change