Best Introspection Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“When the day ends, the promises we never kept return.”

“Across the centuries the moral systems from medival chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.”

“The act of going within, finding our truth, and then sharing it, it helps us far more than we know.”

“Don't call anyone a devil, because within you, you can experience hell and the devil, and the devil is nothing, but you!”

“No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.”

“What you hold in silence often shapes you more than what you say aloud.”

“There’s a kind of strength in gentleness that machines will never understand.”

“Enlightenment isn’t a mountain peak. It’s a hallway light left on when you thought you were alone.”

“There are moments when understanding arrives without words — and once it does, you know that life has already changed.”

“When you are fed up looking for happiness or motivation outside; look inside.”

“A mirror has always symbolized more than glass and reflection.”

“To know yourself, spend a season with something that cannot flatter you.”

“Be like the ocean, stay deep, not everyone deserves to see what’s beneath your surface.”

“Whenever we look around the world, we see smart leaders – in politics, in business, in media – making terrible decisions. What they're lacking is not IQ, but wisdom. Which is no surprise; it has never been harder to tap into our inner wisdom, because in order to do so, we have to disconnect from all our omnipresent devices – our gadgets, our screens, our social media – and reconnect with ourselves.”

“They were quiet for a while, eating, then Oromis asked, "Can you tell me, What is the most important mental tool a person can possess?”

“Pico Iyer: “And at some point, I thought, well, I’ve been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I’ve spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there’s this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps.”

“Isn’t it funny how we make rational excuses for being out of alignment?”

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”

“Maybe worship was the mistake.”

“God whispered, "You endured a lot. For that I am truly sorry, but grateful. I needed you to struggle to help so many. Through that process you would grow into who you have now become. Didn't you know that I gave all my struggles to my favorite children? One only needs to look at the struggles given to your older brother Jesus to know how important you have been to me.”

“As long as I have questions and no answers I’ll keep on writing. How do you start at the beginning, if things happen before they happen? If before the pre-prehistory there were already the apocalyptic monsters? If this story doesn’t exist now, it will. Thinking is an act. Feeling is a fact. Put the two together—I am the one writing what I am writing. God is the world. Truth is always an interior and inexplicable contact. My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it. My heart has emptied itself of every desire and been reduced to its own final or primary beat.”

“You cannot be solved. You can only be understood”

“Nothing is more visible than things hidden; Nothing is more manifest than things minute; Therefore, the superior man should be aware of his aloneness”

“Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.”

“The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.”

“I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.”