personal development on Introspection

It would have been sad for me to spend my life just trying to superimpose stuff on people rather than trying to encourage them to look within themselves for what's of value.

Know yourself and you will have a wholesome fear of God; know him and you will also love him.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?

Even desolation is a world to be explored.

Pentecost Came Like Wildfire I’m lying on an ice pack early this morning, doing my back exercises and listening to  Pray as You Go , a tool for meditation, with monastery bells, music, and a Bible re...

“Know yourself” is good advice. But to know ourselves doesn’t mean to analyze ourselves. Sometimes we want to know ourselves as if we were machines that could be taken apart and put back together at w...

To observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

Know Thyself-but don’t tell anyone.

[In expressive individualism] each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.

Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, exte...

The unexamined life is not worth living.

The people I know who are the most concerned about their individuality, who probe constantly into motives, who are always turned inwards toward their own reactions, usually become less and less indivi...

There is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is through.

The examen makes us aware of moments that at first we might easily pass by as insignificant, moments that ultimately can give direction for our lives.

To know oneself, is above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against the Truth, and not the other way around.

Repentance resulting from self-examination is a lifelong endeavor, occasionally surfacing in the public or private act of confession as an act of “courageous memory” in recalling one’s past.

Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?

Self-judgment may be the greatest barrier to self-understanding.

Self-awareness is a key to self-mastery.

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

"I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have sh** for brains."

'He hath ever but slenderly known himself."

The final mystery is oneself.

I fyou look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. If you look at God, you’ll be at rest.

The pyschologist Carl Rogers, a person who would know quite well the interior lives of others, has this to say of our inmost thoughts: I have most invariably found that the very feeling which has see...

There is not any thing, relating to men and characters, more surprising and unaccountable, than this partiality to themselves. . . . Hence it is that many men seem perfect strangers to their own chara...

"One learns of the pain of others by suffering own’s own pain, my father would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said."

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these...

Paradoxically, if we wish to become more aware of others and their concerns, there is perhaps no better work we can do than developing self-awareness. Consider the findings of a team of psychologists ...