"Introspection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this effusion very coolly. He was quite used to all this sort of worship; he did not think badly of himself; he was not particularly humble-minded or given to troublesome introspection; on the whole, he thought himself a good fellow, and was not at all ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... unhealthy. One might see that, with her, action would always willingly take the place of reflection; that her impulses would have the strength of inspirations; that she would be more ready to receive impressions than to reason upon them. Meditation, comparison, introspection, were wholly foreign to this little, eager, impetuous nature, however they might be forced upon it in the course of years and events; and with her keen sense of enjoyment in all glad outward influences, one might have feared that the realities of life ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... particularly like it, but if anyone had asked him whether he 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 ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... What could be said for a love which made a man so pitiless? Was it worthy of any return? Was it, after all, a thing to be held so jealously to his heart, gnawing out his vitals and robbing him of his humanity? These and many other questions Hardy had had time to ask himself in his fortnight of introspection and as he stood by the doorway waiting he resolved to make amends. From a petty creature wrapped up in his own problems and prepossessions he would make himself over into a man worthy of the name of friend. Yet the consciousness of his fault lay heavy upon ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... 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
... us over to the menace of nothingness; in the first place of nothingness "within" us, and in the second place of nothingness "without" us. That the logic of the pure reason quickly becomes the slave of the emotion of malice may be proved by both introspection and observation. For we note, both in ourselves and others, a peculiar glow of malicious satisfaction when such logic strikes its deadliest blows at what it would persuade us to regard as ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... self-revelations of genius. Pauline's lover is a dreamer, but a dreamer of an uncommon species. He is preoccupied with the processes of his mind, but his mind ranges wildly over the universe and chafes at the limitations it is forced to recognise. Mill, a master, not to say a pedant, of introspection, recognised with amazement the "intense self-consciousness" of this poet, and self-consciousness is the keynote which persists through all its changing harmonies. It is the self-consciousness of a soul compelled by quick and eager senses and vivid intelligence to recognise ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... 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
... thought he understood Caesar. True to his nature, always hoping for the best, he thought that, as the severe judgment of the envious had often done him (Alexander) good, so the sharp satire of the Alexandrians would lead Caracalla to introspection and greater moderation; he only resolved to tell the sufferer nothing further that ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not unnaturally—for he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of introspection—he mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual revival ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... among us; men, too, of no surpassing 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... belonged to his age and his society. He was born of Cynicism and of Introspection. It would have interested him quite as much to find out himself as to find out any other person. While he was moving along in the darkness it occurred to him to remember that he did not know in the least whither, to what rescue, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... of battle was not now burning very brightly in this warrior's soul. From inaction had come introspection. He sought rather to analyze his feelings than distinguish himself by courage and devotion. The result was profoundly disappointing. He covered his face with his hands and ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... hands 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 ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... is able to investigate the mind in two ways, which are of such general application that anybody of sufficient training to make scientific observations at all can repeat them and so confirm the results. One of these is what is called Introspection. It consists in taking note of one's own mind, as all sorts of changes are produced in it, such as emotions, memories, associations of events now gone, etc., and describing everything that takes place. Other persons can repeat the observations ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... for any length of time to have risen above or sunk below a certain level of excellence. Andre, extolled by her latest critics as "a delicious eclogue of the fields," was contemporary with the bombastic, false Byronism of Jacques; the feeble narrative of La Mare au Diable with the passion-introspection of Lucrezia Floriani. The ever-popular Consuelo immediately succeeded the feeble Compagnon du Tour de France. La Marquise, written in the first year of her literary life, shows a power of projection out of herself, and ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... well worth while to investigate the relation of this test to imagery type. Such a study would have to make use of adult subjects trained in introspection. It would seem that success might be favored by the ability to translate the auditory impression into visual imagery, so that the remembered numbers could be read off as from a book; but this may or may not be the case. At any ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... "I kissed a Bishop before I was five!—What's a Lay Reader?" As one humanely willing to condone the future as well as the past she rolled up her white sleeves without further introspection, and dragged out from the protecting shadow of the sink the "humpiest box" which had so excited her emotions at home in an earlier hour of the day. Cracklingly under her eager fingers the clumsy cover slid off, exposing once more to her enraptured gaze ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Rock Fish Gap, where once King Charles' 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 did my ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... as an act of penance. He kept vigils, likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter darkness, sometimes with a glimmering lamp, and sometimes, viewing his own face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he could throw upon it. He thus typified the constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not purify himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint light of their own, in the remote dimness of the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his countrymen have frequently pointed out, these firstfruits of Goethe's genius mark a new departure in lyrical poetry. In them we have the direct simplicity of the best lyrics of the past, but combined with this simplicity a depth of introspection and a fusion of nature with human feeling which is a new content in the imaginative presentation of human experience. In connection with Goethe's Leipzig period we gave a specimen of the best work he was then capable of producing; when we place beside ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... governments will in the future be called upon with increasing frequency to sit in judgment on this case. Conditions about us are rapidly changing. The precepts of yesterday may be out of date and worthless tomorrow. By way of introspection, let us see what principles of equity toward Man and Nature we would lay down as the basis of our action if we were called to the bench. Named in logical sequence they would ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... from his unaccustomed reverie; Adrien Leroy, the popular idol of fashionable society, was not given long to introspection. ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... 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 ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... sullen,—that we all loved him a little more at such times. The ill-health from which he always suffered, and a flower-like delicacy of temperament, the yearning desire to be of some service in the world, coupled with the curious, critical introspection which marks every sensitive and refined nature and paralyzes action, overcast his life and manner to the common eye with pensiveness and even sternness. He wrote verses in which his heart seems to exhale in a sigh of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... liked or even intended in order to have a 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... 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 left wagon loads of crutches and braces ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... godless layman. He is restrained by his austere temperament, by his monk's habit, by Christian doctrine. Nevertheless he moves with easy grace and dignity on planes so far apart as those of patriotism, of devotion, of human sympathy, of introspection. His patriotism finds powerful expression, as already noted, in the Profecia del Tajo, besprinkled with sonorous place-names, these growing fewer as the movement is accelerated, and Father Tagus describes with a mixture of picturesque mediaeval sentiment and martial music the onset ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... reality he cannot find rest. One Irish quality 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 prevent ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... in the bonds 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 to him stupendous." I do not say that this is a quotation, but it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... for others. Time FROM the "hurry and waste of life." Time FROM the "St. Vitus Dance." BUT, on the other side of the ledger, time FOR learning that "there is no safety in stupidity alone." Time FOR introspection. Time FOR reality. Time FOR expansion. Time FOR practicing the art, of living the art of living. Thoreau has been criticized for practicing his policy of expansion by living in a vacuum—but he peopled that ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... 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 ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... introspection swept over her soul. She realised in a moment how petty and base had been her thoughts and how purposeless her actions. She would have given her life at this moment to eradicate from Droulde's mind the knowledge of her own jealousy; she hoped that ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... up for prayer, meditation, and solitary walks, and often went in to service in the cathedral. He says that he was in a state of tense excitement, and the solitude and introspection had an alarmingly depressing effect upon him. He says that the result of this was an appalling mental agony: "It seemed to me after a day or two that there was no truth in religion, that Jesus Christ was not God, that the whole of life was an empty sham, ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is found, upon introspection, to be no chronic disease, how shall there be any trouble? how shall there be ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... Introspection is always a difficult matter to direct and simple natures, such as Kate Kildare's, but she forced herself to it now. Had she in any way failed her children, as Jemima seemed to imply? Was it possible that in her absorption in a fixed idea she had neglected ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... 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 ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... opened her napkin that evening the rush and emotional strain of the day brought a certain flash of introspection. It came first when she lifted her eyes and caught sight of herself in the mirror—dewy eyed, fresh, a pink rose in her hair, a pink ribbon at her throat. What was she, so young, so feminine, doing there, supping alone in state? She remembered ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... came the absorbed expression of introspection, and she carefully indented the outside of her pretty cheek several times with ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... here was but ill-suited for one of Bunyan's morbid sensitiveness. For it was based upon a constant introspection and a scrupulous weighing of each word and action, with a torturing suspicion of its motive, which made a man's ever-varying spiritual feelings the standard of his state before God, instead of leading him off from self to the ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... from European events he was nevertheless ever keen and alert concerning them. Then the winter of 1797 appears to have been very severe. His enforced confinement to home probably gave rise to an introspection, and a slight disappointment in matters which had formerly given him pleasure. For example, he puzzled over the fact that on his second visit to Philadelphia, Mr. Adams was present but once at his ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... on myself I sometimes turn My gaze, with introspection stern, Three persons there I seem to see, "I" and "Myself," they ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... to hurt you, Robin," she said soberly. "I can't help looking for a way out, that's all. For myself, I must find a way out. The life I lead now is stifling me—and I can't see where it will ever be any different, any better. I've become cursed with the twin devils of analysis and introspection. I don't love Jim; I tolerate him. One can't go through life merely tolerating one's husband, and the sort of friends and the sort of existence that appeals to one's husband, unless one is utterly ox-like—and ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of conscience, the fears and hopes, the triumph and despair of the soul which were the preoccupations of the Puritan, were phenomena unknown to the ancient Greek. He lived and acted undisturbed by scrupulous introspection; and the function of his religion was rather to quiet the conscience by ritual than to excite it by ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 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 ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... example 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 was determined ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... unjust and absurd, so she set herself resolutely to overcome that feeling of oppression. She was too well-balanced to drift unwittingly along this perilous road of thought. She schooled herself to endure and to fight off introspection. She had absorbed enough of her husband's sturdy philosophy of life to try and make the best of a bad job. After all, she frequently assured herself, the badness of the job was mostly a state of mind. And she ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 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 enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a dramatist's ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... we see that the day of surface consciousness and its power is waning only as it is controlled and manipulated through the subjective states of man's mind. The hour for subjective research and subjective introspection is at hand,—men have mastered the external world and its laws, and are now following the cosmic urge which is pushing them toward the center and away from the apparent to ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... away;—all things had become new. Creeds were the discarded banners of a mediaeval past, fit only to be hung up in the churches, and looked at as historic monuments; never more to be flaunted in the front of battle! The education of the day was that which taught a man the introspection whereby he recognized the Divine within himself—under any aspect, under any tuition, whether of Brahma, Confucius, or Christ. Truth was kaleidoscopic, and varied with the media through which it was viewed. As for the child, every aspect of truth and error should be allowed to play upon ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... the concession of "one will" from the orthodox side failed to win from the monophysites the expected concession of "two natures." The monophysites were quite consistent here. To deny will of nature is an elementary mistake in psychology. Only a tyro in introspection will ascribe will directly to personality. A one-willed two-natured personality is little short of a psychological monstrosity. An attempt to rally Christendom round such a figure was bound to fail. The only lasting result of the emperor's activity was the formation ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... of most importance. Life is not all play, nor is it all sorrow. But sorrow often does much to develop the musician's character, to make him look into himself and discover his more serious purposes. This might also be accomplished by some such means of self-introspection as "Christian Science." Although I am not a "Christian Scientist," I am a great believer in ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... 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 and ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 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 in play, but finding themselves ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... common-sense plan. He does not stop to lament, nor does he hang about analysing his emotions. He runs and runs and runs, and keeps on running until he has worked the poison out of his system. Not until then does he attempt introspection. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... should have been thus constituted: that Elfride's second lover should not have been one of the great mass of bustling mankind, little given to introspection, whose good-nature might have compensated for any lack of appreciativeness, was the chance of things. That her throbbing, self-confounding, indiscreet heart should have to defend itself unaided against the keen scrutiny and logical power which ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... rather lost contact with and misinterpreted because of our preoccupation with describing and explaining it. Bergson's criticism of our intellectual methods turns simply upon a question of fact, to be settled by direct introspection. If, when we have freed ourselves from the preconceptions created by our normal common sense intellectual point of view, we find that what we know directly is a non-logical process of becoming, then we must admit that intellectual thinking is altogether inappropriate and even mischievous ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... services, which close at midnight with a carol or appropriate hymn, and this custom is especially held by the Wesleyan Methodists in their "Watch Night," when they pray, etc., till about five minutes to twelve, when there is a dead silence, supposed to be spent in introspection, which lasts until the clock strikes, and then they burst forth with a ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... 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 her all her life. In ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... was called on to endure. With the progress of his deafness his inability to cope with even the ordinary affairs of life increased, and this also had the effect of withdrawing him from the world. The spiritual insight gained by years of introspection, of communion with the higher part of his nature enabled him to discover truths hidden to the consciousness of the ordinary man. "That power of shaping the incomprehensible now grows with him; the joy in exercising this power becomes humor. All the pain of existence is wrecked upon the ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... priori, the connection between the two is not far to seek. Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self, induces one to take an interest in others. Introspection tends to make of man a solitary animal, the absence of it a social one. The more impersonal the people, the more will the community supplant the individual in the popular estimation. The type becomes the interesting thing to man, as it always is to nature. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... investigate the laws of conscious life according to the inductive method, and will hence, as much as the physicist, make the existence of fixed laws his initial assumption. If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one assumption more, namely, THAT THIS MUTUAL INTERDEPENDENCE BETWEEN ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... Mr. Chesterton expresses it, of "chopping up life into small sins with a hatchet" is, of course, to be avoided: but the purpose of self-examination and self-knowledge is not to encourage morbid introspection, but by frank acknowledgment and repentance to get rid of the past and with recovered hope and serenity to reach forward towards the future. A man cannot "walk in the Spirit" unless he ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... the part it had to play. When one compares a healthy Pagan ritual—say of Apollo or Dionysus—including its rude and crude sacrifices if you like, but also including its whole-hearted spontaneity and dedication to the common life and welfare—with the morbid self-introspection of the Christian and the eternally recurring question "What shall I do to be saved?"—the comparison is not favorable to the latter. There is (at any rate in modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness about the Christian attitude, and also a painful self-consciousness, which is not pleasant; ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... Winfield. They write both prose and verse and Mrs. Henthorne was a reporter for years. Mrs. Bellman, when a girl, lived five years on a cattle ranch and to those five lonely years she credits her habit of introspection, meditation and writing. Much of her poetry and short stories are used in ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... that entered into a man driving him beyond the power of endurance? It was past his comprehension. And he wondered suddenly for the first time why he had been made so different to the generality of men. But introspection was foreign to him, he had not been in the habit of dissecting his own personality and his thoughts turned quickly with greater interest to the man who sat near him plunged like himself into silent reverie. And as he looked he scowled with angry irritation. The Frenchman in ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... of late years defined the abuse of their science as the morphology of common opinion. Contemporary investigators, they say, have been too much occupied with introspection; their labors have become merely physiologico-biographical, and they have greatly neglected the study of averages. For, says La Rochefoucauld, Il est plus ais de connotre lhomme en gnral que de connotre un homme en particulier; and on so wide a subject ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... weeks for introspection—for introspection beneath gloomy skies, in that old house, rendered darker by the fact that it lay in a hollow crowned by fir trees with their black shadows. It was not a good situation for a girl. She began thinking about love, ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... in good esteem; as every honest man is bound to do, or surely the rogues will devour him. Modesty kept him silent as to his merits very often; but the exercise of self-examination made them manifest to himself. As the Yorkshireman said to his minister, when pressed to make daily introspection, "I dare na do it, sir; it sets me up so, and leaveth no chance for my neighbors;" so the great free-trader, in charity for others, forbore to examine himself too much. But without doing that, he was conscious of being as good as Master Anerley; and intended, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... not quite livable without him. Mr. Starkweather was swept by an emotion which took him wholly by surprise and almost overcame him; he sat up, and began to wonder where he could find some occupation which would chink up the crevices in his thoughts, and prevent him from introspection. Eventually he hit upon it, and with a conscious effort, he pulled himself out of his chair, and went over to Masonic Hall ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... you are a fine, delicately-made man, pregnant with poetry as the egg of the nightingale is pregnant with music, and throbbing with an exquisite nervous sensibility, perhaps languishing under some vague and occult disease, of which you are only conscious in moments of intense introspection, this mode of approaching the diagnosis is apt to ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... 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 of careful weighing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... young poet, she burdened her own intensity with the sorrows of her race. She wrote one novel, Reuben Sachs, and two volumes of poetry—the more distinctive of the two being half-pathetically and half-ironically entitled A Minor Poet (1884). After several years of brooding introspection, she committed suicide in 1889 at the ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... accompanied by sympathy so keen that, were it not for the hint of humour which they also held, he might almost have been mawkish, a sentimentalist too easily dissolved in tears. His thick eyebrows clung closely to his eyes, and gave him a look of introspection that mitigated the shrewdness of his pointing nose. There was some weakness, but not much, in the full, projecting lower lip and the slightly receding chin that caused his short, tightened upper lip to look indrawn and strained; and the big, ungainly, jutting ears consorted ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... diary has the character we here claim for it, and is not the mere ordinary result of a morbid and aimless introspection, is plainly shown by the speedy cessation of excessive self-analysis on Father Hecker's part, after he had actually reached the goal to which he was at this period alternately sweetly led and violently ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Introversion. Introspection is the more usual word to express the analytic self-searching ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... golden hair which had fallen a little over her face, brightening its sorrow. Every feature quivered under the invisible cutting hand of cruel experience. In those last sharp moments of introspection she had gained such a knowledge of suffering that a fire seemed to have consumed her vision of life, reducing it to a frightful desert of eternal woe and unavailing sacrifice. Partially stunned, and partially blinded by misery, she felt the awful helplessness and pain of what ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... fell the burdens of the ranch household. From feeling that she never would be equal to the task of caring for so many people, Mrs. Purnell came to find her health greatly improved by her duties, which left her no opportunity for morbid introspection. ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... 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
... hour spent in the contemplation of the common end of all that live, in introspection and retrospection, who of us does not again take up the burdens of life with renewed resolutions to redouble our energies to faithfully discharge ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... time for introspection during the last five days, for Struthers has been in bed with lumbago, and the weight of the housework reverted to me. But Whinstane Sandy brought his precious bottle of Universal Ointment in from the bunk-house, and while that fiery mixture warmed her lame back, the thought of its ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... divisions than those it creates in itself by distinguishing its objects and its organs. Reference to external conditions, though seldom explicit in these writers, who imagined they could appeal to an introspection not revealing the external world, was pervasive in them; as, for instance, where Hume made his fundamental distinction between impressions and ideas, where the discrimination was based nominally on relative vividness and priority in time, but really on causation respectively by outer ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... have three hundred and sixty-five thoughts in the whole of his life, or, if he did, he kept them to himself. He was a man of action, not of introspection." ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... to be much given to introspection, she had never asked herself whither the last few months had been leading her. But now, an hour ago, the touch of Eliot's lips against her hand and the sudden, passionate demand in his voice had torn aside the veil and shown ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... angel to have ascended into Paradise, and there to have beholden the forms of those beautified spirits from which I might have copied my archangel; but not being able to mount so high, it was in vain for me to search for his resemblance here below, so that I was forced to make an introspection into my own mind, and into that idea of beauty which I have formed ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... in the world attends the motive-power of any action. Infinite perspectives of mental mirrors reflect the whys of all doing. An adult with long practice in analytic introspection soon becomes bewildered when he strives to evolve the primary and fundamental reasons for his deeds; a child so striving would be lost in unexpected depths; but a child never strives. A child obeys unquestioningly and absolutely ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of tension that allowed of no reaction. His was a mind not morbidly self-conscious, but ever aglow with the consciousness of power and the ardor of its achievement, in-sensible of waste and undisturbed by critical introspection. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Platonism, whether we call it religion or philosophy, is unhellenic. 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 ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of these, let us call them, faculties. Besides I should prefer that these pages deal only with such mental facts as can be found in the Reader's everyday (however unnoticed) experience, instead of requiring for their detection the artificial conditions of specialised introspection or laboratory experiment. So I shall give to those much fought over words attention and memory merely the rough and ready meaning with which we are familiar in everyday language, and only beg the Reader to notice that, whatever ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... torn sleeves." Everybody will remember his noble, austere face, as seen in the numerous prints: the square, massive head, with the forest of rough hair; the strong features, so furrowed with the marks of passion and sadness; the eyes, with their look of introspection and insight; the whole expression of the countenance as of an ancient prophet. Such was the impression made by Beethoven on all who saw him, except in his moods of fierce wrath, which toward the last were not uncommon, though short-lived. A sorely tried, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... are seeking to make. In a little while they are young men and women, and then men and women, save for a fresher vigour, like ourselves. For us it comes at last to fellowship and resignation. For them it comes at last to responsibility, to freedom, and to introspection and the searching of hearts. We must if we would be men-makers, as the first and immediate part of the business, correct and finish ourselves. The good New Republican must needs ask and ask repeatedly: What have I done and what am I doing with myself while I tamper with the lives of others? ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... important lessons had passed her by. She had never learned that to 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 ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... authenticated." Tennyson was equally careful for scientific accuracy in regard to all the phenomena of nature. Byron had not scientific accuracy, but with his objectivity Goethe sympathized more than with the reflection and introspection ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... that they are under an illusion. This is one of the many cases in which men do not really believe, but rather believe they believe. It is not that they can truly conceive ten millions of special creations to have taken place, but that they think they can do so. Careful introspection will show them that they have never yet realized to themselves the creation of even one species. If they have formed a definite conception of the process, let them tell us how a new species is constructed, and how it makes its appearance. Is it thrown down from the clouds? or must we hold to the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... rode. In the evening, she came to the library, and many and many a conversation was there held, whose details, if they could be preserved, would justify all encomiums. They interested me in every manner;—talent, memory, wit, stern introspection, poetic play, religion, the finest personal feeling, the aspects of the future, each followed each in full activity, and left me, I remember, enriched and sometimes astonished by the gifts of my guest. Her topics were numerous, but the cardinal points of poetry, love, and ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... realized in the 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 the intensity of the weather, and my own increasing indisposition, ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... "Acute introspection," Fitzhugh said, losing his smile. "He began to try to compute the workings of his own brain. That meant that he had to use his non-random circuits to analyze the workings of his random circuits. He exceeded optimum; the entire brain is ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... ceiling): Good Windbag, a searching introspection Finds but few, excepting only those Who office hold or look with longing eyes For vacancies the ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... I spoil her, but that is only because Kitty is quicker at saying a thing than I am. She is our only child; and I sometimes wonder, at moments of acute mental introspection (say, in the night watches after an indigestible supper), what we should ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... with Miss Taft—perhaps because of them—I had my moments of gloomy introspection wherein I cast up accounts in order to determine what I had gained by my six months' vacation in the wilderness. First of all I had become a master trailer—so much was assured, but this acquirement did not promise to be of any practical benefit to me except ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... thoughts reverted to their exotic phase of his awakening, drifting into such introspection as he seldom indulged, and led him far from the immediate riddle, by strange ways to a revelation altogether unpresaged and a resolve still ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Long Island as they swirled by her, she found herself wishing once that her eyes were made like those of a doll. She had lately discovered of one that when it appeared to fall asleep, it merely turned its eyes around to look into its own head. With any lesser opportunity for introspection she felt that certain doubts as to her own motives and processes would remain for ever unresolved. It was not that she could not say "I have done no wickedness;" let us place this heroine in no false light. She was little ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... he was a man of letters, and his love of adventure occasionally got the better of his love of logic, making his novels a curious mixture of convincing truth and wild romanticism. His heroes are singularly like himself, a mixture of morbid introspection and restless energy: he seems to have taken special pleasure in making them succeed where he had failed in life, and when the spirit of the story-teller gets the better of the psychologist, he sends them on a career of adventure which puts to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and I travelled through to Forstadt. I was received at the railway 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 of which the ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... simply opened his lucky and wise mouth at the proper moment, and the money, like ripe, golden fruit, had fallen into it, a gift from benign heaven, surely a cause for happiness! And yet—he did not feel so jolly! He was surprised, he was even a little hurt, to discover by introspection that monetary gain was not necessarily accompanied by felicity. Nevertheless, this very successful man of the world of the Five Towns, having been born on the 27th of May 1867, had reached the age of forty-three and ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... admiration for the many immigrant girls who in the midst of insuperable difficulties resist all temptations. Such admiration was certainly due Olga, a tall, handsome girl, a little passive and slow, yet with that touch of dignity which a continued mood of introspection so often lends to the young. Olga had been in Chicago for a year living with an aunt who, when she returned to Sweden, placed her niece in a boarding-house which she knew to be thoroughly respectable. But a friendless girl of such striking beauty could not escape the machinations of those ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... source of great grief and pain to both of us, but it has not moved me to anger. It has rather caused me to devote such hours as I could spare from the preparation of my series of sermons on the miracle of Jonah to personal introspection, in the endeavour to discover, if possible, whether the cause of our estrangement lay in any defect ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... little. 'You must remember this is only my second visit, and I have not made much way with her. She is in a state of bodily and mental discomfort very painful to witness. If I am not mistaken, she is driving herself half-crazy with introspection and self-will. You must not give way to this morbid desire to increase her own wretchedness. She needs firmness as well ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... emotions she would have been obliged to face the disagreeable truth that she, Anne Wellington, was jealous. Jealous of a stable of horses! After all, introspection, however deep, might not have opened her eyes as to the basic element of her mood, for jealousy had never been among the components of her mental equipment. At all events she was, as she would have expressed ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... wore on. My curse of introspection left me, and descending through the town to the pier, amid the breezy blue skirts and bonnet-strings, we watched the packet-boat approaching. There was in advance one of the famous swift island wherries. Something ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... rapidly 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. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... it which, with no assurance of reciprocation, devotes exclusive ardour to an object only approachable through declared obstacles. Godwin Peak was not framed for romantic languishment. In general, the more complex a man's mechanism, and the more pronounced his habit of introspection, the less capable is he of loving with vehemence and constancy. Heroes of passion are for the most part primitive natures, nobly tempered; in our time they tend to extinction. Growing vulgarism on the ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... 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
... 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 was bestowed upon ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... in themselves, their doubts, and feelings. If wisely dealt with, not by direct ridicule, but by a wholesome neglect of the child's revelations, treating them as of no special interest or importance, and discouraging that minute introspection which, of doubtful good at any age, is absolutely destructive of the simplicity of childhood, this unnatural condition will soon pass away. It will help this object very much, if the child is sent on a visit to judicious friends, and change of scene, ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... consciousness that if truth be visible to any human mind it was hidden from his. The possession of an ample fortune and the lack of family ties and active interests in life had fostered his tendency toward introspection till it became morbid. Now, at the age of thirty, he had no positive beliefs or aims, and felt the despairing self-contempt which inspired Hamlet's cry, "What should such fellows as I do, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... Then there is Mr. Fearing, that morbidly self-conscious creature, who is so much at home in the Valley of Humiliation that he kneels down and kisses the flowers in its grass. He is a man who can never get rid of himself for a moment, and who bores all the company with his illimitable and anxious introspection. Yet, in Vanity Fair, when practical facts have to be faced instead of morbid fancies and inflamed conscience, he is the most valiant of men, whom they can hardly keep from getting himself killed, and for that matter all the rest of them. Here, again, is an inimitable flash ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... out 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 the old woman made an addition of her own—a wonderful rebozo. ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... of Japan from the rest of the world, so conducive to introspection, has been highly favourable to the development of Teaism. Our home and habits, costume and cuisine, porcelain, lacquer, painting—our very literature—all have been subject to its influence. No student of Japanese culture could ever ignore its presence. It has permeated the elegance ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... fanatics who find ecstasy in vertigo, so thought, turning on itself, exhausted by the stress of introspection and tired of vain effort, falls terror-stricken. So it would seem that man must be a void and that by dint of delving unto himself he reaches the last turn of a spiral. There, as on the summits of mountains and at the bottom ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... difference in their natures. Dorothy was one of the happy persons whose attraction was so apparent that few natures resisted it. She was handsome and straightforward and sweet tempered. One girl in a family of six brothers, she had learned a freemasonry of living, and had not the sensitiveness and introspection that troubles so many young girls. Her mother was dead, yet she and her father had been such intimate friends that she had not felt the keenness of her loss as she must ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... again—and then Peter stops. He too is puzzled vaguely. However, bother introspection, the concert proceeds, both artists doing their level best. Now one of them pauses, now the other, and at length serious doubts begin to creep in. There is something ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... in such isolation as she,—whose intellect, naturally subject to her affection, had become more so through the absence of systematic education,—whose morality had been allowed to be merely one of instinct,—to whom introspection had been till now a thing unknown,—and who, accepting a husband as another child accepts a parent, had, in the whirl of gay life where she afterward reigned, found so little time for thought, and remained in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... 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 broad surfaces; but the annoyance was unheeded. Next reaching a fir plantation, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... convinced—as I am—of the truth of my arguments, and however sure I may be that many others will not only agree with my conclusions, but will see that in "Introspection" rather than in "Intellectualism" lies the key to the Mystery, I do not wish to appear dogmatic in any of the suggestions contained in this volume; I am stating my own convictions, but at the same time I fully recognise that the presentation of the Absolute, with its infinite variety ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... exceptional, although it must be confessed that they are becoming every day less rare. They think, no doubt, for the most part about the commonplace incidents of their daily life, and possibly they are given too much to morbid introspection. But anything that serves to make a human being exercise the function for which his brain was originally intended should be regarded with thankfulness. It is a thousand times better for the development of the mind to speculate about the motives of acquaintances, or to philosophize on the shortcomings ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... twenty-two, but she was very small, and looked no more than sixteen. She had the dreams and questioning wonder of extreme youth in her face, and something beyond that even, which was more like the wide-eye brooding and introspection of babyhood. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... he stood in the street that October evening, had no more idea what his next step was to be than had Mr Halgrove or the motherly Mrs Jessop. He was a matter-of-fact youth, and not much given to introspection; but the reader may do well on this particular occasion to take a hasty stock of him as he walked aimlessly down ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... Morbid introspection had become a part of the young man's pain. The study of the changes in himself proved more pleasant than painful. His mind swung between bitter depression, and warm, natural joy. His moments of deepest joy were coincident with ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... gradually swelling prelude. There is defiant power in the first theme, and the constant reference to it betrays the composer's exasperated mental condition. This tendency to return upon himself, a tormenting introspection, certainly signifies a grave state. But consider the musical weight of the work, the recklessly bold outpourings of a mind almost distraught! There is no greater test for the poet-pianist than the F sharp minor ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... a sorry subject for over-much meditation, don't you think? And introspection is very bad for invalids," Katherine ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... in bed and unmistakably asleep when she went into the bedroom. Man-like, having got his way, he was not troubled by doubts or introspection. It ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... season she held fast her trust in God, and kept on her way, though uncheered for a time by the joyous emotions with which she had so long been favoured. It was well that her mind, which had been overtaxed and strained by the intensity of her religious fervour, and by its unbroken continuity of introspection, should be brought into a more healthful state by this bitter tonic ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... difference in favour of the white man in what they call the higher faculties of the mind. But the much-abused word "faculty" no longer bears the meaning given to it by Locke and his followers who propounded a limitless brood or set of faculties to correspond with every process discoverable by introspection as taking place in the mind. In modern psychology the word means simply a capacity for an ultimate, irreducible, or unanalysable mode of thinking of, or being conscious of, objects. Perception, for instance, ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... 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 Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... isn't even that. You talk partly for the sake of saying things that sound effective, and partly because you are morbid from over introspection. If you were vicious, I should say you did it as an atonement. Many people would not understand you, but as I do, it is harmless for you to ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... attributes of hers were what he needed to win him, to cheer him, to charm him, to guide him. He longed so to please her, to ingratiate himself with her, that he attempted to be light like her in his talk, but lapsed into abysmal absences and gloomy recesses of introspection. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... returned to his seat and for some time remained wrapped in thought. These moments of introspection, of deep self-questioning, had become more and more frequent. He had made in the past few months a new and most interesting acquaintance—himself. All the years of his over-hurried, over-cultivated, ambitious ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... entrance examination to the University. Mr. Collins continued to assist him with counsel and deed; and his hospitable house in Bredgade became a second home to Andersen. There he met, for the first time, people of refinement and culture on equal terms; and his morbid self-introspection was in a measure cured by kindly association, tempered by wholesome fun and friendly criticism. He now resolved to abandon his University studies and devote ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... which dwelt on her quiet charms for their own sake, as in Theocritus, and, like the modern, rose to greater intensity in the presence of the amorous passion, as we see in Kallimachos and the Anthology. It was the outcome of Hellenism, of which sentimental introspection, the freeing of the ego from the bonds of race and position, and the discovery of the individual in all directions of human existence, were marks. And this feeling developing from Homer to Longos, from unreflecting to conscious and then to sentimental pleasure in Nature, was expressed not only in ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... had, he flattered himself, terminated in his favour; chiefly, because of his attitude of entire frankness, a compliment to the girl. That he had been, in the strict sense of the word, open-hearted, it did not occur to him to doubt. Dyce Lashmar's introspection stopped at a certain point. He was still a very young man, and circumstance had never yet shown him an ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... American university undergraduates, the intellectual maturity of the Russian or Polish student and his eagerness for the discussion of abstract problems in sociology and metaphysics are very impressive. The amount of space given in Russian novels to philosophical introspection and debate is a truthful portrayal of the subtle Russian mind. Russians love to talk; they are strenuous in conversation, and forget their meals and their sleep. I have known some Russians who will sit up all night, engaged in the discussion of a purely abstract topic, totally ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... The child may be unconscious of the matter, but the teacher is acutely conscious. When she stands before her class she sees the child growing into her image, and this reflection gives cause and occasion for a careful and critical introspection. She feels constrained to take an inventory of herself to determine whether she can stand a test that is ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... voiced the question wistfully on the height of a long breath. She drew it from a silence which seemed to her to have filled this strange, gay house for an eternity. For the first time full awareness of the present cut a rift in the troubled cloudiness of her introspection. She had been sitting in her chair, listless and wan, now staring at the flames, now following Wen Ho's activities with absent eyes. A storm was swirling outside. Near the window, Prosper, a figure of keen absorption, bent over his writing-table, his long, fine hand driving the pencil across sheet ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... 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 not have ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... high up from her forehead and low down on it, in crisp tendrils like fine wire. Yet, but for her nose, which was a shade too long, a thought too retrousse, Miss Haviland would have been beautiful after the Greek type. (Audrey's own type, as she had once described it in a moment of introspection, was the "Roman piquante," therefore she made that admission the more readily.) There was a touch of classic grace, too, in the girl's figure and her dress. She had rolled up the sleeves of her long blue overall, and bound it below her breasts ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... is open to the convincing pleasures of the simple and unadorned life; he is satisfied with simple people. The snuff of the burnt candle of enjoyment he calls regret, repentance. He gives himself the delights of introspection, and wishes he were a child again—yes, indeed it is so, dear ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that constant introspection which is found in Cecil Forester's nervous hero, "Captain Horatio Hornblower." That man doubtless would have died of stomach ulcers before winning his second stripe. It is not a matter of, "How do I look to someone else?" but of, "What do I know about myself?" The kind of work which ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... introspection had the alarming result of showing him that his mind, when looked at from within, was no longer familiar ground. He felt, that is to say, what he had never consciously felt before; he was revealed to himself as other than he was wont to think him; he was afloat upon a sea of unknown ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf |
