Conrad Aiken Quotes

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

The moving toward one's inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.

The journey I'm taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I'm seeing is my inner self and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my heart.

Perhaps the longest journey is the journey within.

The longest journey is the journey inward.

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life.

One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.

There's no journey worth taking except the journey through one's self. That's the most important journey you take. I found that out as I went around the world many times: I was learning about me.

Each character represented a trait that resides in me.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

In the past, I've visited remote places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldn't ordinarily explore.

I'm not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I'd rather be figured out.

I don't think we spend enough time in reflection and introspection. We don't know who we are as individuals in this culture anymore.

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.

The only journey is the one within.

In order to find yourself, who you really are, you got to be with yourself; you got to hang out with yourself.

Travel is a combination of the personal and the emotional.

There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind. It tracks the evolution of a single consciousness in order to give us an experience - an experience of looking for something and then finding ourselves in a different place by the time we've finished our journey.

In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

Every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.