Self-Contemplation Quotes

Remain quiet. Don't feel you have to talk all the time. Go within and you will see the Loveliness behind all beauty.

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?

MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.

I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come.

Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of nature's varied forms.

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

I am not only retired from all public employments, but I am retiring within myself, and shall be able to view the solitary walk and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction.

When I was twelve years old I thought up an odd trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My inference wasthat God, in contemplating himself, created the second person of the godhead; but that, in order to be able to contemplate himself, he had to contemplate, and thus to create, his opposite.--With this I began to do philosophy.

Usually, when the distractions of daily life deplete our energy, the first thing we eliminate is the thing we eliminate is the thing we need the most: quiet, reflective time. Time to dream, time to contemplate what's working and what's not, so that we can make changes for the better.

...feminism never harmed anybody unless it was some feminists. The danger is that the study and contemplation of "ourselves" may become so absorbing that it builds by slow degrees a high wall that shuts out the great world of thought.

Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.

We are in our Self. We are not in the world.

The heart and mind can find peace and harmony by contemplating the transcendental nature of the true self as supreme effulgent life.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

We talk of communing with Nature, but 'tis with ourselves we commune... Nature furnishes the conditions - the solitude - and the soul furnishes the entertainment.

It's great having time to just sit back and work through things in my mind. It helps put life into perspective.

I've a full-length triple-panel mirror in which I can see every possible angle, and I spend quite a lot of time in front of it.

People hiss at me, but I applaud myself in my own house, and at the same time contemplate the money in my chest.

In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."

There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don’t see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren’t there.

The naive which is simultaneously beautiful, poetic, and idealistic, must be both intention and instinct. The essence of intention, in this sense, is freedom. Consciousness is far from intention. There is a certain enamoured contemplation of one's own naturalness or silliness which itself is unspeakably silly. Intention does not necessarily require a profound calculation or plan.

I think no matter what kind of life you have, whether it looks one way to people or another way, you always have moments when you imagine a different life.

For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.

I prefer listening to talking, reading to socializing, and cozy chats to group settings.