"Introspection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attention and filled her with interest. And therefore her own identity was not strong to her, as it is strong to those whose business permits them to look frequently into themselves, or whose occupations are of a nature to produce such introspection. If her head ached, or had she lamed her hand by any accident, she would think more of the injury to the household arising from her incapacity than of her own pain. It is so, reader, with your gardener, ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... fruition of the divine presence. For increase of years she made but little allowance, so that, whilst her love to God and heavenly meekness became increasingly apparent to others, her diminished energy was sometimes to herself the occasion of painful conflict and introspection."] Before I awoke I thought a letter was put into my hands, the contents of which were 'Through much tribulation ye shall enter the kingdom." The Lord giving me power, I will fight my passage through.—Through ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... had been accustomed, he found himself in a town filled with troops—British and French. Instead of living alone or with one companion, he occupied quarters in a big yamen full of officers and men—a change which probably benefited a character too given to seriousness and introspection. ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... he ever passed. What a time for calm meditation and patience!—better things than preaching. You know he lives in a throng; this will be a blessed 'retreat,' as the Catholics call it. He is stomach-full of prosperity; perhaps he needed an alterative. Introspection is a rare thing in our modern outward-bound life. He is accustomed to preach to great admiring audiences; to-day he will preach to ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... involved and has strong motivation, we can only assume that the resistance must be unconscious. Usually, it will be necessary to work through this unconscious resistance before the subject responds. If the subject is conditioning himself, this will involve a great deal of introspection, and even then it is an extremely difficult job. One doesn't usually have proper insight into one's own emotional make-up. The end result is that one can ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... young, she was handsomer than any other woman on the train, and seemingly unaware of it as she leaned her elbow upon the dusty window-sill and gazed out in pensive introspection upon the bleak land where glaciers had trampled and volcanoes raged, each of them leaving its waste of worn stone ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... an order, and she saw five or six guerrillas rise out of the cacti and spring toward her. But the constant shadow of self-introspection haunted her even then. In her despair, and worse, in her disgust, feeling already those filthy hands upon her, she yet appraised this jewel among ecstatic shudders, and she knew in her heart that she would ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... chance of passing him in his chair and scrutinising again the features that masked such depravity. For that they masked it cannot be denied. A physiognomist looking at him would have conceded a certain gloom, a trend towards introspection, possibly a hypertrophied love of self, but no more. Physiognomists, however, can retire from the case, for they are as often wrong as hand-writing experts. And if any Lavater had been on board and had advanced such a theory he would have been as unpopular as JONAH, for the man's wickedness ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... He knew it in every pulsation of his heart, in every imagination of his mind, and with the quickened senses of the lover he perceived that Robin's feelings differed from his own. For a year he had been lost in introspection; now they seemed to have changed places, and she grew silent ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... With the distrustful introspection of maiden youth, she suddenly asked herself whether by any possibility she were different from other girls and whether she had not some strange defect, physical or mental, of which the existence had been most carefully concealed from ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... something, will continue to write and speak as long as they can spell or articulate. Thoughtful men are apt to misapply the advice, and betray their trust when they sit still and leave the "war of words to those who like it." When Carlyle condemned self-consciousness, a constant introspection and comparison of self with others, he theoretically struck at the root of the morbid moods of himself and other mental analysts; he had no intention to over-exalt mere muscularity or to deify athletic sports. It were easy to multiply instances of truths clearly conceived at first and parodied ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... for several minutes in a bleak and desolate valley of introspection wherein Mr. Wordsley dared not intrude. There was a certain grandeur about his great, dark visage, his falciform nose and meaty jowls as he stood there. Mr. Wordsley began to fidget and ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... intellect and wit which the French call ESPRIT. They had also, in superlative measure, the social gifts which women of genius reared in the library or apart from the world, are apt to lack. The close study of books leads to a knowledge of man rather than of men. It tends toward habits of introspection which are fatal to the clear and swift vision required for successful leadership of any sort. Social talent is distinct, and implies a happy poise of character and intellect; the delicate blending of many gifts, not the supremacy of one. It implies taste and versatility, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... fissure in the walls of his neurotic soul he peered and saw its strange perturbations, divined their origins in the very roots of his being, and recorded—as did Poe, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche—the fluctuations of his sick will. With this Russian, his Hamlet-like introspection becomes vertigo, and life itself fades into a dream compounded of febrile melancholy or blood lust. It was not without warrant that he allows Rogoszin, in The Idiot, to murder Nastasia Philipovna, because of her physical charms. The aura of the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... great store of noble sentiment and high desire, but it had deprived him of that rounded knowledge of actual life which alone, it would appear, teaches how to guide these forces into the more useful channels. Then as to capacity, he had the fine sensibilities of a poet, the facile introspection of the philosophical cast of mind, without the mental power to write good verse or to be a philosopher. He had, at least in youth, the conscience of a saint without the courage and endurance which appear necessary to heroism. In mockery the quality of ambition ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... shook himself from his unaccustomed reverie; Adrien Leroy, the popular idol of fashionable society, was not given long to introspection. ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... of body or mind, for coldness toward his Saviour. And almost to the end of his days he was, occasionally, visited by seasons of spiritual gloom and depression, which, no doubt, were chiefly, if not solely, the result of physical causes. It was an error that grew readily out of the brooding introspection and self-anatomy which marked the religious habit of the times. The close connection between physical causes and morbid or abnormal conditions of the spiritual life, was not as well understood then as it is now. Many things were ascribed ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... men broke a bottle in honor of the king, and took possession of all the lands west of the Pacific. The West—the word in some way thrilled in my blood—I knew not why. I was a boy. I had not learned to question any emotion, and introspection troubled me no more than it ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... to be and seek to be friendly to, and interested in, all sorts of people, and truthful and helpful and hating concealment. To be that with any approach to perfection demands an intricate and difficult effort, introspection to the hilt of one's power, a saving natural gift; one has to avoid pedantry, aggression, brutality, amiable tiresomeness—there are pitfalls on every side. The more one thinks about other people the more interesting and pleasing they are; I am all for kindly gossip and knowing things about them, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... we muse on these withholden glories, as we drive rapidly homeward. Umbrellas shut off the scenery where the mists do not, and we are forced to introspection. We resort for comfort to praising each other for bearing the disappointment so well. We laud each other's ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... congenial employment, whether profitable to the State or not, and the labor should be induced, not enforced, and always timed and suited to their malady. A variety of interesting occupations tends to divert from delusional introspection. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... massive and forbidding and iron barred. Clark stopped here for a moment and looked back at St. Marys with its flaming maples and its scattered roofs from which rose plumes of light, gray smoke. His eyes half closed as though in some sudden introspection, till, turning abruptly, he struck off over a road that led across a mile of level land and came presently to the grave of the industrial hopes of the town. It was an ugly scar in the ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... of intellect, damned with a dower of beauty; sensitive, alert, possessing an impetuous nature that endeavored to find its gratification in religion. Born into a rich family, and marrying a rich man, unkind Fate gave her time for introspection, and her mind became morbid through lack of employment for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... read "The True Story of his Life," that he has not been able to employ in a still more striking manner, the experience of his singular career. But, as we have already observed, he betrays no habit or power of mental analysis; he has not that introspection which, in the phrase of our poet Daniel, "raises a man above himself;" so that Andersen could contemplate Andersen, and combine the impartial scrutiny of a spectator with the thorough knowledge which self can only have of self. So far from censuring him for the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... religious reticence, in these devout good souls, be perhaps a merit, and sign of health in them? Jocelin, Eadmer, and such religious men, have as yet nothing of 'Methodism;' no Doubt or even root of Doubt. Religion is not a diseased self-introspection, an agonising inquiry: their duties are clear to them, the way of supreme good plain, indisputable, and they are travelling on it. Religion lies over them like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and life-element, which is not spoken ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... memory of Rice's words came flooding back to him. Whatever else was true, this man's sufferings were real indeed. To him she had never been anything but a most charming benefactor. In a momentary fit of introspection he told himself, then, that her sex ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... made a little noise in his throat as one does who would attract attention. "You speak as one who has thought much upon many subjects. Is it, then, possible that you of the red race have pleasure in thought? Do you know aught of the joys of introspection? Do reason and logic form any part ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "you're going to stop asking yourself rude questions for ever and ever, Amen! You haven't time to waste on introspection. You love him. That's a good thing, anyway. Never mind how you love him, never mind if it's a John the Baptist love or a mother love or a fever produced by the tropics, as Wullie said, you've to do things as best you can and understand them afterwards, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the house, I began to pay an unusual amount of attention to this faculty in me, in order to discover by its aid the secret of the sadness which continued at all times during this period to oppress my heart. I only discovered, what others have discovered before me, that the practice of introspection has a corrosive effect on the mind, which only serves to aggravate the malady it is intended to cure. During those restful days in the Mother's Room, when I had sat with Chastel, this spirit of melancholy ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... "Where there is found, upon introspection, to be no chronic disease, how shall there be any trouble? how shall there be ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... told me at parting, 'call me the tragic comedian.' And again I saw that this actor is set apart from the run of his brethren by an almost uncanny gift for introspection. He has ruthlessly analysed himself. He knows, as he put it, 'what God meant him to be.' Was here a hint ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... for his own good name and his own pride, he must answer with a lie; shame that he should not be master in his own house—still more, shame that anyone should see that he was not. To be sure, he did not know that he felt shame, being unused to introspection, having always kept it at arm's length. For he always meditated concretely, as, for instance, when he looked up and did not see his wife at breakfast, but saw Bester making coffee, he thought, 'That fellow knows all about it, I shouldn't wonder!' and he felt angry ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... type of men began with Petrarca, men accustomed to introspection, who selected their own ideals, and moulded their minds to them. The medieval system could prepare him for death; but, seeing the vicissitudes of fortune and the difficulties of life, he depended on the intellectual treasures of the ancient world, on the ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... accounted for that by saying there was a large American colony in Paris, who had corrupted the French, and taught them our pernicious habit of introspection." ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... destiny. Gad, I forgot all about it: Jock started a rabbit and put it clean out of my head. Besides, why should I give way to morbid introspection? It's a sign of madness. Read Lombroso. [To Lord Summerhays] Well, Summerhays, has my little girl been ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Mr. Stackpole's faculties for observation of the motives and actions of his fellows had been sheathed. Still, disuse had not altogether dulled them. Constant introspection had not destroyed his gift for speculation. It was rusted, but still workable. He had read aright Squire Jonas' stupefaction, the watchmaker's ludicrous alarm. He now read aright the chill which the very sight of his altered mien—cheerful and sprightly where they ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to introspection and analysis; daring the past two months more especially he had been far too busy to be perpetually asking "Why? why?"—the vice of indolence. It was enough that, in the cold and the wet, there was a fire in his heart that kept him glad with thinking of the ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... actually hated it, he would have answered no. I suppose people almost always want something external to themselves, to reveal to them their own likes and dislikes. Our most assured likings have for the most part been arrived at neither by introspection nor by any process of conscious reasoning, but by the bounding forth of the heart to welcome the gospel proclaimed to it by another. We hear some say that such and such a thing is thus or thus, and in a moment the train that has been laid within us, but whose presence ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... for you to say and think that," he was saying with an odd air of introspection, quite as if he were reassuring somebody inside of him. "I don't think there was anything untrue in that letter, but—no doubt it must have seemed so. And of course ... I don't suppose you can go to the Heth Works much, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of courageous introspection, a silence fell upon the pair; the silence held firm while they got out of the grounds and crossed Oldcastle-road, and took to the Alls field-path, from which a unique panorama of Bursley—chimneys, kilns, canals, railways, and smoke-pall—is to be obtained. ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... himself by jumbling together snatches of the songs of the other birds in a sort of potpourri; or perhaps he will be scolding or arguing with an imaginary foe, then dropping his voice and talking confidentially to himself. Suddenly he bursts into a charming, simple little song, as if the introspection had given him reason for real joy. All these vocal accomplishments suggest the chat at once; but the minute your intrusion is discovered the sharp scolding, that is fairly screamed at you from an enraged little throat, leaves no possible shadow ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... once become articulately conscious of existing, it is an easy matter to begin doubting whether we exist at all. As long as man was too unreflecting a creature to articulate in words his consciousness of his own existence, he knew very well that he existed, but he did not know that he knew it. With introspection, and the perception recognised, for better or worse, that he was a fact, came also the perception that he had no solid ground for believing that he was a fact at all. That nice, sensible, unintrospective people who were too busy trying to exist pleasantly to trouble their heads as to whether ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... joys and sorrows in as vivid colors as possible, in the hope that I may do something to defend the weak from the strong. People never dream of all that is going on in the little heads of the young, for few adults are given to introspection, and those who are incapable of recalling their own feelings under restraint and disappointment can have no appreciation of the sufferings of children who can neither describe nor analyze what they feel. In defending themselves against injustice they are as ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... she were like most girls, but I tell you, Betty, this child of ours, this devoted, obedient little thing, has more mind, more introspection, than any young creature I ever knew. There is the making of a dozen ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... as proud as the devil;' ask again, 'whether on this very account that you think yourself as proud as the devil, you do not think yourself to be very humble' (iv. 282). That is a characteristic bit of subtilising, and it indicates the danger of all this excessive introspection. Edwards would not have accepted the moral that the best plan is to think about yourself as little as possible; for from his point of view this constant cross-examination of all your feelings, this dissection of emotion down to its finest and most intricate convolutions, was of the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... until my peculiar mental phases should leave me never to return, love and marriage were impossible—so the very truth was, and always had been, that I had sufficient strength to restrain any incipient desire, and prudence enough to avoid temptation. My condition encouraged introspection. I was almost constantly probing my own mind, and by mere strength of will, which I had long cultivated until—I suppose there is no immodesty in saying it—I could govern myself, I drew back from every obstacle which my ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... over the lower ranch buildings at the distant pastures. Tresler was slightly behind him as he stood, and only had a sight of the man's profile. He did not seem to be looking at any particular object. His attitude was one of thoughtful introspection. Tresler waited. Things were turning out better than he had hoped, and he had no wish but to let the arbiter of the situation take his own way. He began to think that, whatever Jake's ulterior object might be, he was ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... to leave my room early in the morning, and if ever I force myself to do so without sufficient cause, nothing remains to me for the rest of the day but the choice between idle distraction and morbid introspection. Thus it happened that I put off for several days my visit to the old man, which I had agreed to pay in the morning. At last I could not master my impatience any longer, and went. I had no difficulty in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... I wore an air Of pensive introspection, And then I curled down anywhere. They whispered of infection, And hoist me on two sticks as though I bore the leper's label, And took me where, all in a row Of tiny beds, two score or ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... book, that reforms are not reforms at all, rather the same things dressed up in other clothes. Values are set up on false standards. Women in trying to become emancipated are likely to become slaves; the fear of the past is given over to a too delicate introspection of the probable vices and virtues of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... traffic, passionate figures rise up and demand of life what its fever is, in "Foma Gordyeeff" it is a Russian who so rises up and demands. For Gorky, the Bitter One, is essentially a Russian in his grasp on the facts of life and in his treatment. All the Russian self-analysis and insistent introspection are his. And, like all his brother Russians, ardent, passionate protest impregnates his work. There is a purpose to it. He writes because he has something to say which the world should hear. From that clenched fist of his, light and airy romances, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... more monotonous part has been disposed of. The Litany has, however, the advantage that it comes only one at a time, we do not kneel down to a whole plateful of it; on the other hand, there was wine with the artichokes and they were free from any trace of morbid introspection. ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... begged that she might be permitted to write out the great thoughts that began to throng her mind. She was not allowed to do so, and the record is lost. Here is a case where the record is preserved. But Karslake, being a young man not very much given to introspection, his work is more a picture of things seen than a transcription of things thought. However, one may read between the lines; the very breaks are eloquent, while the break at the end speaks with a significance that no ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... possesses, or appears to possess, formulae to meet all possible emergencies, and consequently brings with it a happiness that is genuine, though superficial. But this customary belief rarely satisfies for long. Contact with the world brings to light other and opposed theories: introspection and independent investigation of the bases of the hereditary faith are commenced; many doctrines that have been hitherto accepted as eternally and indisputably true are found to rest upon but slight foundation, ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... not for the woman. Her work is done alone, and at the time her husband comes home and wants to stay there, she would like to get out. Work that is in the main lonely, and work that on the whole leaves the mind free, leads almost inevitably to daydreaming and introspection. These are essentials, in the housework,—monotony, ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... but no ideas can be communicated at all except by the aid of conventions to which both parties have agreed to attach an identical meaning. The agreement may be very informal, and may pass so unconsciously from one generation to another that its existence can only be recognised by the aid of much introspection, but it will be always there. A sayer, a sayee, and a convention, no matter what, agreed upon between them as inseparably attached to the idea which it is intended to convey—these comprise all the essentials ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... not really leaning upon physiological theory. The appeal to our knowledge of the brain facilitates the conception of the immediacy of our feelings of relation; but that immediacy would be apparent to a sharp introspection. We do not need to think of the eye or skin to feel that light and heat are ultimate data; no more do we need to think of cerebral excitements to see that right and left, before and after, good and bad, one and two, like and unlike, are irreducible ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... receive, one must give; to be loved, one must love; to attain, one must reach out. It never occurred to her to weigh her own shortcomings and throw them into the balance with those of her enemies. She spent no time in introspection, self examination. She set a high standard on her own virtues, and, like most persons of this character, was oblivious to ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... "God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world" is hardly an expression of faith, but a certainty of existence. Not so with the Russian, upon whom the oppression of centuries has left its stamp. This same note of gloomy or even morbid introspection is found in some of the great literature of the world—in the Bible, the Greek Tragedies and in Shakespeare. Granted that optimism is the only working creed for every-day life, until the millenium arrives a sincere and artistic expression of the sorrows of humanity will always strike a note ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... note given away with the programme Mr. LOUIS N. PARKER, describes L'Aiglon as "the Hamlet of the nineteenth century." Certainly they had in common the habits of introspection, and indecision; but the egoism of Hamlet was at least tempered by a knowledge of the world; he was a student; he had travelled and seen men and things outside the bounds of Elsinore; and he was capable of throwing off some quotable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... entire absence of close inspection of one's own character and conduct. I know very well that it is not a wholesome thing for a man to be always poking in his own feelings and emotions. I know also that, in a former generation, there was far too much introspection, instead of looking to Jesus Christ and forgetting self. I do not believe that self-examination, directed to the discovery of reasons for trusting the sincerity of my own faith, is a good thing. But I do believe that, without the practice ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... blatant critics would only give over blowing their individual horns, and remark for a little the value of quiet introspection, many mysteries would reveal themselves and ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... he has which no Irishman was ever without—pugnacity; and that is certainly a great virtue, especially in the present age. But he has not the tenacity of conviction which goes with the fighting spirit in a man like Bernard Shaw. His weakness of introspection and selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent him fighting; but they will always ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... With not much more introspection than his uncle, but with a keener conscience and quicker observation, Richard had early remarked that, notwithstanding her assiduity in church-going, his mother did not seem the happier for her religion: there was a cloud, or ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... with weak eyes shrinks from the light, was the outward sign of a secret violence in his soul, yet she ministered helplessly to each passing explosion of temper as if it were the cause instead of the result of his suffering. Introspection, which had lain under a moral ban in a society that assumed the existence of an unholy alliance between the secret and the evil, could not help her because she had never indulged in it. Partly because of the ingenuous candour of the Pendleton nature, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... More speaking ensued: but the minister had it all to himself. He said—"Will any brother speak; now is the time; if you have anything to state utter it; lose no time, but say on." Never a brother spoke; eye-squeezing and thumb-turning, and deep introspection followed; and in the end the minister rose, took his text from three or four parts of the Bible, and gave a lengthy discourse, relieved at intervals with genuine outbursts of eloquence, relative to Christian action and general duty. He seemed to have a ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... the fence. Bracing his legs before him so as to serve as props, he thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and raising his eyes appealingly to the stars, ejaculated, "Proposed to, by Jove!" A period of profound introspection followed, and then he broke forth: "Well, I 'll be hanged!" emphasizing each word with a slow nod. Then he began to laugh,—not noisily; scarcely audibly, indeed; but with the deep, unctuous chuckle of one who gloats over some exquisitely absurd situation, ...
— A Love Story Reversed - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... strange manner; it cut him off from Nature, for he could see nothing of her; it cut him off from man, for he could not have seen even a legion of soldiers had they surrounded him. This removal of outside influences threw him back upon himself, and delivered him to introspection; he began for the hundredth time to weigh his position, to consider whether the momentous step that he was taking was necessary to his ease of mind, was ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... in passages of the American Note Books, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over Tieck with a German dictionary. The Twice-Told Tales are the work of a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his own heart, acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little contact with men. Many of them were shadowy, and others were morbid and unwholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psychological situations like that of Ethan Brand in ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... humility, since they presumed to prescribe inviolable laws to ages far wiser than themselves. Yet though the philosophy of the Greek and Roman were lost, would it need more than the years of a generation to replace what scarcely can exceed the introspection of a single experience? If their art were lost, does not the ideal of humanity remain the same so long as the nature of humanity endures? But of the seven sciences of antiquity, two alone deserve the name,—their arithmetic and their geometry. Their music was a cumbrous and complicated machinery, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... nothing but reflect. Hamlet seems meant to show how vain it is to be merely a philosopher in this world. Hamlet is always pondering, thinking of the abstract rights and wrongs of the case. In the result, though he does eventually avenge his father's murder, his introspection and vacillation have led to the death of himself and no fewer than three other innocent persons—Ophelia, Polonius and Laertes. Yet Hamlet was at least twice as brainy as the rest of them, and he was also a good ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... and unmistakably asleep when she went into the bedroom. Man-like, having got his way, he was not troubled by doubts or introspection. It was done. ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... station by a large and distinguished company. My mother was at Artenberg, where I was to join her that evening, but Hammerfeldt awaited me, and some of the gentlemen attached to the Court. I was too much given to introspection and self-appraisement not to be aware that my experiences had given me a lift toward manhood; my shyness was smothered, though not killed, by a kind of mechanical ease born of practice. After greeting Hammerfeldt I received the welcome of the company with a composed courtesy ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... The Elizabethan audience, as we have seen, loved action, and in these Senecan tragedies the action took place "off." But they had a strong and abiding influence on the popular stage; they gave it its ghosts, its supernatural warnings, its conception of nemesis and revenge, they gave it its love of introspection and the long passages in which introspection, description or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue, holds up the action; contradictorily enough they gave it something at least of its melodrama. Perhaps they helped to ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... kitten, solemn music. She is correspondingly volatile in the opposite direction and often laughs at real calamities with wonderful courage. She has a fund of romance in her nature which has led her to the pass she now is in. She is clever, too, at introspection and analysis—of herself chiefly. She studies her own sensations and dissects her moods. Her selfishness is of the peculiar sort which should have kept her from marrying until she found the hundredth man who could appreciate ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... hours afterwards he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor of fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious introspection. It was a base thing which he had done—it was also a strange thing psychologically; and at intervals he tried to understand it, to track it to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... being held by soft and marvellous memories, by one long vision of Noel and the moonlit grass, under the dark Abbey wall. This moment of passage from wonder to wonder was quite too much for a boy unused to introspection, and he stood staring stupidly at Calais, while the thunder of his new life came rolling in on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... shame in it; but her heart was suddenly illuminated by a flash of introspection. She became painfully conscious how much Pierre Philibert had occupied her thoughts for years, and now all at once she knew he was a man, and a great and noble one. She was thoroughly perplexed and half angry. She questioned herself sharply, as ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... no denying that here is a faith capable of producing a distinctive type of character. It tends at its best toward an extreme conscientiousness and an always excessive introspection; it creates also a vast and brooding patience. "In countries where reincarnation and karma [the law of Cause and Effect] are taken for granted by every peasant and labourer, the belief spreads a certain quiet ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... of matrimony. Time goes so fast these days that I met them again, and Auntie Hamps, and Maggie, and Clara, and the rest of the Three Towns company, as after an enormous interval. They themselves however have changed in nothing, except perhaps that the habit of introspection and their phenomenal capacity for self-astonishment have become more pronounced. "He thought, 'I am I; this wife is my wife; and if I put one foot before the other I shall go inevitably forward.' And it seemed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... Almanac office, then located at Cambridge, and we well knew work of that sort required brains of the best. Since Simon Newcomb's death an interesting story has been told about his heredity. His strong-brained father, measuring his own qualities with rigid introspection, discovering where he was weak and where capable resolved that whatever wife he chose should supplement in her personality the points to which he lacked. He would father sons and daughters who should come into the world well appointed; in particular he looked toward offspring who should possess ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... peculiarly apt: "over-scrupulous, disquieted over trifles, indecisive in action, and anxious about their affairs. They are given early to morbid introspection, and are easily worried about their own indispositions or the illnesses of their friends. They are often timorous and apprehensive, and prone to pedantism. The moral sentiments are pronounced in most cases, and if they are, as a rule, somewhat exigent ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... the ceiling): Good Windbag, a searching introspection Finds but few, excepting only those Who office hold or look with longing eyes For vacancies ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... England village, it became a necessity and almost a pleasure. When few stirring events diverted thought from the petty and the personal, when pent-up emotion found little outlet in the graces or amusements of social intercourse, observation and introspection fastened upon the minutiae of life and every eccentricity of speech and conduct was weighed and assessed. Close espionage on conduct was matched by the careful scrutiny accorded every novel opinion. When the weekly ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... It is quite unnecessary to look for Asiatic influences in a school which clung close to the Attic tradition. It is more to the purpose to show how a religious philosophy of mystical revelation and introspection grew naturally out of the older nature-philosophies, just as in our own day metaphysics and science have both been driven back upon the theory of knowledge and psychology. It should not be necessary to remind Hellenists that 'Know thyself' passed for the supreme word of wisdom in the classical ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... to introspection or the matter of his own appearance. With one quick gesture he swept away the shrouding tangle of webs, spiders, and dead flies that obscured the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... yet joined the cloister, now felt the call to labor in the wilderness. Later, in 1653, came Marguerite Bourgeoys to the little colony beneath the mountain. She too, like Jeanne Mance, distrusted dreams and visions and mystic communings, cherishing a religion of good works rather than introspection of the soul. Dauversiere and Olier remained in France. Fortunately for Montreal, practical Christians, fighting soldiers of the cross, carried the heavenly ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... not appreciated at all. Self-conscious children will complain much of breathlessness and a sense of suffocation, of headache, of palpitation, of intolerable itching, of the pressure of clothing, or of flushing and a sense of heat. Excessive introspection influences their conduct in many ways. At children's parties, for example, they will be found wandering about unhappy, dazed and unable to feel the reality of the surroundings which afford such joy to the others; or they may be anxious to join ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... loves me! He is a man with feeling and generosity. But he, too, is resigned. They are all ill—these men! They have no courage! From pure learning and introspection they have lost all confidence in themselves. This Conrad! Why doesn't he say to me: "Adelaide, I want you to be my wife?" He can be brazen enough when he wants to! God forbid! He philosophizes about my kind of happiness and his kind of happiness! It was all very fine, but sheer nonsense.—My ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... happiness. She was so very busy with her school work, with doing all she could to help Donald with his, with her "Jane Meredith" articles, with hunting and working out material for her book, that she never had many minutes at a time for introspection. When she did have a few she sometimes pondered deeply as to whether Marian had been altogether sincere in the last letter she had written her in their correspondence, but she was so delighted in the outcome that if she did at times have the same ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... work like worry. If you are given to introspection and worry, and allow these things to go unchecked, they become habits with you, and while your sleep, in a measure, is an antidote for worry, yet the more worry you have the less soundly you will sleep, and consequently ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... and classing as morbid all forms of introspection, she always so dreaded to have the conversation drift into a reflective channel that whenever she found Willie indulging in reveries she was wont to rout him out of them, tartly reproaching herself for having even indirectly been the ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... WRITINGS One volume, containing Unity of Good, Rudimental Divine Science, No and Yes, Retrospection and Introspection; uniform in style with the pocket edition of Science and Health. Morocco, limp, round corners, gilt edges, heavy Oxford India Bible paper, single copy $3.50; six or more, each $3.26. Library edition, cloth, marbled edges, single copy $2.00; six ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker G. Eddy
... pieces (and we might sacrifice a few for the sake of the experiment), there is no inspecting augur who could divine therefrom our literary future. The diverse indications would puzzle the most acute dissector. Lost in the variety, the multiplicity of minute details, the refinements of analysis and introspection, he would miss any leading indications. For with all its variety, it seems to me that one characteristic of recent fiction is its narrowness—narrowness of vision and of treatment. It deals with lives ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... reasons for supposing volitions to be determined are strong but not conclusive, and we decided that even if volitions are mechanically determined, that is no reason for denying freedom in the sense revealed by introspection, or for supposing that mechanical events are not determined by volitions. The problem of free will versus determinism is therefore, if we were right, mainly illusory, but in part not yet capable ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... if Diane built faces and fancies in the ember-glow of the Seminole fire-wheel? What wonder if like the pine-wood sparrow and the wind of Okeechobee the voice of the woodland always questioned? Conscience, soul-argument—what you will—there were voices in the wild which stirred the girl's heart to introspection. ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... nature, her starting-point? Her introspection was not very reassuring. She felt that perhaps the most hopeful indication was her strong rebound from what she at last recognized as mean and unworthy. She also had a little natural curiosity and vanity to see if her face was changing with changing motives. ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... same reason, I have confined my statements of theory as to method, to those which reflect my own experience; my "rules" were drawn from introspection and retrospection, at the urging of others, long after the instinctive method they exemplify had ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... and properly graduated, I believe there are few people in these days who would not greatly benefit by a reduction in the number of meals and in the quantity of food they take. By means of a healthy and cheerful habit of introspection—not morbid and feverish—I am firmly convinced that by cutting down their meals most people would not only greatly improve their health, but their mental and spiritual condition as well, and also greatly increase their capacity ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... empty, as if the brain had ceased to act, and all vitality was driven back on the heart, which swells to choking; when it seems, in the spiritual sense, that as energy returns so far as to allow of self-command once more, of introspection, we peer down in appalling silence into ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... spent in Stratford were not conducive either to domestic felicity or peace of mind. How Shakespeare occupied himself during these years we may never know, though it is very probable that he worked in the capacity of assistant to his father. That these were years of introspection and remorse to one of his spirit, however, there can be little doubt; there can be still less doubt that they were also years of formative growth, and that in this interval the irresponsible youth, who had given hostages to fortune by marrying at the age of eighteen, steadied by the ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... had closed in to a dark and dreary night when the steward came from the potter's door to proceed homewards again. The gloom did not tend to raise his spirits, and in the total lack of objects to attract his eye, he soon fell to introspection as before. It was along the margin of turnip fields that his path lay, and the large leaves of the crop struck flatly against his feet at every step, pouring upon them the rolling drops of moisture gathered upon their ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... move took place the A.I.F. indulged in a little introspection. Considering the size to which the Force had grown it was inevitable that some proportion of undesirables must exist in its ranks. Nor is this to be wondered at when it is remembered that in certain cities in Australia magistrates released well known criminals from custody on ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... must adhere to orthodoxy: especially in this matter (so much disputed in the counsels of Mr. R.J.Campbell), the matter of insisting on the immanent or the transcendent deity. By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference—Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation—Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... never forget the failures of that year, but she also knew that the comfort of accustomed activities would help to fill his mind and keep his thoughts from sore introspection. Here in Topeka there was nothing to do but cogitate and reflect. It was therefore a relief to her when Elizabeth received a letter from her mother summoning her home to teach a spring term of school. While at any other time she would have been filled with indignation ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... completely to the degrading actualities of life that this insistence led to. Multitudes of men retired to the desert and to the protective walls of monasteries. There, by constant privations, fastings, continual prayer, flagellation, and introspection, they spent their lives. These ascetic individuals by these means were enabled to enter what may be called a "theologic trance" and their subsequent hallucinations, illusions, and delusions gave to them what they deemed to be a transcendental insight ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... which even a lad could appreciate, and towards which he would readily take an attitude of stout partisanship. The boy was deeply affected by these surroundings. "I was bred a Protestant," he said long afterwards, "and that strictly, too." Trained as he was in Puritan habits of introspection, he listened for the voice of God, and heard it. Thus the tone of his life was set. There were moments in his youth when "the world," as the phrase is, attracted him; there were times in his great career when he ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by which such changes come—not in a month or a year; but in an hour, a breath. One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young creature, all emotion, quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, prone to occasional introspection and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman, tender but not shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified on occasion, but with little girlish lapses into frolic ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... not that the truest witness to the common source of these inborn Ideas would readily be acknowledged by all, could they return to it now with their matured power of introspection, which is, at least, one of the few advantages of advancing years. But, though we cannot bring back youth, we may still recover much of its purer revelations of our nature from what has been left in the memory. From the dim present, then, we would appeal to that fresher time, ere the young spirit ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... sinful condition, could offer any genuine comfort. Miss Earle has summarized with briefness and force the results of such training: "A frightened child, a retiring girl, a vacillating sweetheart, an unwilling bride, she became the mother of eight children; but always suffered from morbid introspection, and overwhelming fear of death and the future life, until at the age of thirty-five her father sadly wrote, 'God has delivered her now ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... clasping her knees and the level sun in her eyes. Her thoughts were soon faraway on the misty trail they had worn for themselves in the many years they had traversed the wilderness in search of what it held, and the eyes between the narrowed lids became blank with introspection. And as she sat thus, a little way withdrawn from the scurrying activity of the scene, there came a step on the soft green sod and a slim form in buckskins halted ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... and makes money because of the undoubted influence of mind in causing and in removing those ailments that originate in fear, imagination, or morbid introspection. A few years ago a little out-of-the-way town in southern Minnesota was visited by train loads of the sick and crippled from miles around. Miraculous cures were heralded broadcast. Life-long cripples ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... arranging ideas already more or less familiar, so that they may be built into new combinations; and this, I think, I have in no small degree accomplished as regards the microcosm of my own mind. But I state this much only for the sake of adding a confession that, as far as introspection can carry one, it does not appear to me that the modifications which my views have undergone since the publication of my previous Candid Examination are due so much to purely logical processes of the intellect, as to the sub-conscious (and therefore more or less unanalyzable) influences ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... repute. He spent all his working life with a magnifying glass in his eye, peering into the mechanism of watches, adjusting the delicate pivots and springs on which their lives moved. His occupation had perhaps encouraged in him a habit of introspection. Perhaps he found the human machine as worthy of interest as the works of watches and clocks. Anyhow, in his leisure moments, which were few, he would discuss curiously with Mary the hidden springs that ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... of her almost trance-like introspection. The young senora was excited, as a child might have been, at the prospect of a long ride through the chaparral, and she must not be disappointed. She had fashioned a riding-habit and a very charming little jacket, and to these ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... of motive and feeling. This warning is specially necessary today, because this is, above all, an age of introspection and analysis. We have only to glance at the principal novels and plays during the last quarter of a century, more especially during the last ten years, to see how this spirit has crept into our literature ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... orthodox Jewish family there was always something doing. Fasts, feasts, flowers, sweetmeats, lights, candles, little journeys, visits, calls, dances, prayers, responses, wails, cries of exultation, shouts of triumph—"Rejoicing of the Law"—these prevented monotony, stagnation and introspection. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... scientific psychology to supersede the philosophic psychology of Plato and Aristotle. In his Essay on the Conduct of the Human Understanding (1690) upon which he spent many years of labor, he first applied the methods of scientific observation to the mind, analyzed experiences, and employed introspection and comparative mental study. He thus built up a psychology based on the analysis of experiences, and came to the conclusion that our knowledge is derived by reflection on experience coming through sensation. He is consequently ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... his epigram with enjoyment.] Introspection is the only bar to such an honourable endeavour, [BLACKBOROUGH gapes.] You don't suffer from that ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... The dread introspection pictured after the sin is in the highest degree tragic, and affects one like remorse in its relentlessness, although less remorse than fear of discovery. The sickness of the following condition, with its yearnings, longings, dizziness, is very nobly done, and delicate as is the theme, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the Fran-thought had been working in the under-layers of his mental processes all the time his upper crust had busied itself with rehearsals of "Beyond the Alps lies Italy" and the determination of Hamlet's madness. But now was no time for introspection, and he set himself the task of solving the new mystery. As Fran merged from the mouth of the alley, Abbott dived into its bowels, but when he reached the next street, no Fran ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... introspection of the processes in my own case, I came to the conclusion that it is certainly a combination of these two illusions that causes the overestimation of the short filled distances. In the case of the long distances, the underestimation of the filled space ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... make other men forget themselves has conferred upon the world a priceless boon. Introspection is insanity—to open the windows and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... homophony. When a partial discord is produced between the new irritation and the mnemic irritation, the organism always tends to reestablish homophony (harmony). This is seen in psychological introspection by activity of attention; in embryology by the phenomenon of regeneration; and in phylogeny by ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... been happy before. She had of course not known this; her adventures in introspection had been very few, besides she had not known what happiness looked like; her father, her uncle, and her aunts were not exactly ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Hooker. "I have sinned myself into darkness," said Bailey. "Many times have I been ready to lay down my ministry, thinking God had forsaken me." "I was almost in the suburbs of hell all day." Yet who can say that this habit of agonizing introspection wholly shut out the trivial enjoyments of daily life? Who drank, for instance, that twelve gallons of sack and that six gallons of white wine which the General Court thought it convenient that the Auditor should send, "as a small testimony of the Court's respect, to the reverend ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... down Broadway, Frederick, in his state of introspection and shame, looked blindly upon the houses as they glided by. Suddenly he started up from his crouching position. The sign of the Hoffman House had struck his eye and recalled the appointment the men on the Hamburg had made. He consulted his watch, and found it was just ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Beethoven's thought. The difference between a work like Romeo and one of Beethoven's symphonies is that the former, it would seem, endeavours to express objective emotions and subjects in music. I do not see why music should not follow poetry in getting away from introspection and trying to paint the drama of the universe. Shakespeare is as good as Dante. Besides, one may add, it is always Berlioz himself that is discovered in his music: it is his soul starving for love and mocked at by shadows ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... and we shared insensibly from being connected with that growth. In retrospect now, and giving due recognition to this crescent spirit, I recall that, in spite of it, Omar Khayyam was the favorite poet of many of us, that introspection, which sometimes deepened into pessimism, was in vogue, and that a spiritual or philosophic languorous disenchantment sicklied o'er the somewhat mottled cast of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer |
