Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.
At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?
Can you question who you are? And are you comfortable with not knowing?
The most important conversations, briefings, meeting, and lectures you will ever have will be those you hold with yourself in the privacy of your own mind.
We talk of communing with Nature but 'tis with ourselves we commune .... Nature furnishes the conditions.
At its heartmeat core, writing is about exploring the questions of your heart on the assumption that what intrigues you, what inflames or amuses or ennobles you, will have the same effect on someone else. It's about taking chances, and taking risks, and pushing yourself to be honest in the issues that present themselves.
Turn in upon yourselves, get into your closets, and now resolve to dwell there. You have been strangers to this work too long; you have kept other vineyards too long; you have trifled about the borders of religion too long. Will you now resolve to look better to your hearts? Will you hate and come out of the crowds of business and clamors of the world and retire yourselves more than you have done? Oh, that this day you would resolve upon it!
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child.
I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do.
I am not a depressive person at all, but I reflect a lot on my life, and life in general, from the perspective of death.
I think prayerful meditation, being still in a space, being still with God, I don't do that enough. It's crazy, because when I do do it, I always walk away from it going, 'Why the hell am I not doing that more?'
The unfolding of the bare human soul...that is what interests me.
There was no himself in himself.
My nature is a quagmire of unresolved confessions.
Spiritual wisdom consists in finding out the subtleties, policies, and depths of any indwelling sin... to trace this serpent in all its turnings and windings; be able to say, at its most secret actings, 'This is your old way and course; I know what you aim at.'
The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness. The remarkable thing is that the cessation of the inner dialogue marks also the end of our concern with the world around us. It is as if we noted the world and think about it only when we have to report it to ourselves.
Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.
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.
I still don't know how to express the really delicate personal stuff. People think that Plastic Ono is very personal, but there are some subtleties of emotions which I cannot seem to express in pop music, and it frustrates me. Maybe that's why I still search for other ways of expressing myself. Song writing is a limiting experience in some ways - writing down words that have to rhyme.
We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.
The law is about you looking at yourself. The new covenant is all about you seeing Jesus.
Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into him and to lose himself in his ideas.
Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress.
