top of page
.png){kind=small}
"It was one of those moments-which sometimes occur only at the interval of years-when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Self-Reflection quotes
"Oh, how clearly I see your faults! Such distinctly highlighted flaws; it's as if the sun and moon mean to keep them illuminated in my eyes. My mind is quick to spell out a simple remedy for those defects. But alas, poor me! My own faults-which I only assume to have because all do-are blurred and obscured by a mental fog. I've no eyes with which to gaze back at myself. The sun and moon refuse their illumination, and my mind offers no sure elixir but a complex recipe scribbled in foreign words I scarcely comprehend."
"I put myself and all the members of Congress in the same boat of things that could have been done better."
"If there is wrong [ill] on the inside, the outside will appear wrong. Therefore, you should inquire within 'why am I bothered, when others are not? So there must be wrong within me only."
"I grab the pillows off the bed and chuck them at the reflection in the mirror of the girl I no longer know. I watch as the girl in the mirror stares back at me, sobbing pathetically. The weakness in her tears infuriates me."
"Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are... Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God."
"This has to be the most self-centered thing I've ever said, but no, I think you just wanted to vex me."
"No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?"
"When we constantly meditate on another's faults, it is because we are neglecting our own unhealed wounds."
"Oh yes, I am frequently driven to an enraged frenzy by the blatantly crass actions of others. But to be painfully honest, that anger is much less driven by the reality of their actions and far more fueled by the realization that everything I am is everything that I hate in them."
Explore more quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little."
"That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding out a cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a broken foot."
"It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object."
"The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors."
"He had that sense, or inward prophecy,-- which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,-- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime."
bottom of page