Inner Restlessness Quotes

On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at Court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.

I have a rat inside my skull that runs on a treadmill - pitta-patta pitta-patta pitta-patta. I enjoy the company of other people who experience that pitta-patta in their skulls.

Philosophy is properly home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is took weak and fuddled to shake off.

I find that an entertainer is quite content to sit still, and I think an artist always has a little motion, always going somewhere. May not know where it is, but there is some sort of unnamed destination. There is some pulling, some movement. So I just found myself in that category according to my own analysis.

The most violent passions sometimes leave us at rest, but vanity agitates us constantly.

The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with that-which-is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place.

What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished?

Although I was calm as a child, I had this restlessness about me–this need and hunger to create my own world. Poetry filled that void, and its words fed that vital necessity of ownership.

When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.

Once a man has tasted creative action, then thereafter, no matter how safely he schools himself in patience, he is restive, acutely dissatisfied with anything else. He becomes as a lover to whom abstinence is intolerable.

The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still.

It's a compulsion. I'm always changing parts of me. Even when I was young, I wanted to change my hair color. I was so determined that I dyed my hair with Kool-Aid.

The culture and educational system of the contemporary West are based almost exclusively upon the training of the reasoning brain and, to a lesser degree, of the aesthetic emotions. Most of us have forgotten that we are not only brain and will, senses and feelings; we are also spirit. Modern man has for the most part lost touch with the truest and highest aspect of himself; and the result of this inward alienation can be seen all too plainly in his restlessness, his lack of identity and his loss of hope.