"Introspective" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... law sufficiently not to be a matter of sheer "knack." It has its technique. The following suggestions are an attempt to state what seem the foundation principles of that technique. The general statements are deduced from many consecutive experiences; partly, too, they are the results of introspective analysis, confirmed by observation. They do not make up an exclusive body of rules, wholly adequate to produce good work, of themselves; they do include, so far as my observation and experience allow, the fundamental requisites ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... long-nosed, even from the beginning—a shy, introspective, self-conscious little boy, made peculiarly familiar with his personal defects by constant remarks that his hair was red and that his nose was long. At school, for years, he was known familiarly as "Rufus," "Red-Head," "Carrot-Top," ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... Shall our shouting offspring clamber Up your broad and beetling sides; Ne'er again, when eventide's Coming turns the skies to amber And the fluting blackbirds call, Poised above a bale of fodder In your well-appointed stall Will you muse upon it all, Patient introspective plodder. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... I hesitate. Shall I give you a satire; shall I devote myself to eulogy; shall I tear what they call the "whitewash" aside and expose them to the winds of excoriation; or shall I devote myself to an introspective, analytical divertissement? But I do not wish to educate you on the Americans, but to entertain, to make you laugh by the recital of comical truths; so without system I am going to tell you of these Americans as I found them, day by day, month ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... practised only by Mr. Bross; P. Sybarite, instinctively aware that any such mode of locomotion would ill become one of his inches, contented himself with keeping up—his gait an apparently effortless, tireless, and comfortable amble, congruent with bowed shoulders, bended head, introspective eyes, and his aspect in general ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... perhaps received less attention than they deserve. The tacit assumption of the majority of critics seems to be that the poet, like the criminal, is the last man who should pass judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by no means certain that this view is correct. Introspective analysis on the part of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive of aesthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observer of literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... the whole inclined to trace these things back to the influence of the pork, working on systems weakened by shock; but Robert was not in the mood to trace them to anything. Unsuccessful fishermen are not fond of introspective suggestions. The member of the expedition who enjoyed himself beyond any question was Mrs. Coolahan's car-horse. Having been taken out of the shafts on the road above the river, he had with his harness on his back, like Horatius, unhesitatingly ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... perhaps the worst crime a man can be guilty of in the eyes of such a woman, yet the accusation did not trouble him now as much as it would have done at another time. He was restless, and if his conscience was too moribund to have the power of pricking, he had become introspective. Fear and superstition took hold of him, and he could not shake himself free. The news which the messenger had brought him was good news, yet, even as the man had delivered it, a candle had guttered ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... lived at this day, she would probably have spent her time between her promise and its fulfilment in self-analysis and introspective reasoning with her own conscience. But the women of a century ago were not tossed about with winds of various opinions, or made foolishly subtile by arguments about principles which ought never to be associated with dissent. A few strong, plain dictates had ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... he would wait and watch for another chance. Meantime the long separation of miles, and the creeping days, gave him a feeling of desolation such as he had never experienced before. He began to grow introspective. He fancied that perhaps he had overestimated Ruth's friendship for him. The dear memories he had cherished during the voyage were brought out in the nightwatches and ruthlessly reviewed, until his own shy hope that the light in her eyes had been for him began to fade, and in its place ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... the context that he accepted this confessional and introspective quality as an expression of the highest emotional life—of the essence, therefore, of religion. On this point the sincerest admirers of the poem may find themselves at issue with Mr. Fox. Its sentiment is warmly religious; it is always, in a certain sense, spiritual; but its intellectual ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... martial cap; the mouth, a feature seldom beautiful in men, blending sweetness and firmness in rare degree, now compressed and almost colorless; but the eyes! the "empty, melancholy eyes"! what strange, glassy, introspective fixedness! what inexplicable fascination, as if they were riveted on some object unseen by other mortals! A glance sufficed to show to myself, at least, that he was in a state of tense nervous excitation, similar to that of a subject of mesmerism. A preternatural power ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ecclesiastical control of its own clergy, won, indeed, by this means the name of the Free Church, though, in point of theological opinion, it was far from representing the more free and progressive element. Tulloch pays a beautiful tribute to the character of Erskine, whom he knew. Quiet, brooding, introspective, he read his Bible and his own soul, and with singular purity of intuition generalised from his own experience. Therewith is described, however, both the power and the limitation of his work. His first book was entitled Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... introspection, but there is at present considerable dissent from this doctrine, the dissenters holding that an objective type of observation of human behavior is distinctively psychological and probably more significant and fruitful than the introspective attitude. However this may be, both introspection and behavior study require attention to matters that are commonly disregarded. Every one is of course interested in what people do, or at least in the outcome of their activities; but psychology is interested in the activities themselves, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... bread-knife, held butt to thumb, dagger-wise. Where he had come by the rust-bitten thing no one knows, least of all himself. In the broken light his eyes shone with a curious luminosity of their own, absorbed, introspective. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... Attention becomes less painful, less tense, i.e., there is less general muscular and emotional reaction. Expectation is less a physical matter—perhaps because we have been so often disappointed—and is more cerebral and the emotions are more reflective and introspective in their expression and less a physical outburst. Indeed, the process often enough goes too far, and we long for the excitement of anticipation and realization. We do not start at a noise, and though a great crowd will "stir our blood" (excitement popularly phrased ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... interest to give my reasons for these variations at length. They depend upon certain differences between the English and the French public, which are more readily felt than explained. Some of the passages which I have left untranslated seemed to me to overweight the introspective side of the Journal, already so full—to overweight it, at any rate, for English readers. Others which I have retained, though they often relate to local names and books, more or less unfamiliar to the general public, yet seemed to ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... almost exactly like a German student. Rather large and bulky, he had a quite hairless face, very fair, with Teutonic features, and a high forehead, above which the pale hair of his head was cropped like the coat of a newly singed horse. His eyes were pale blue, introspective and romantic. At the back of his neck, just above his low collar, appeared a neat little roll of white flesh. Charmian thought he looked as if he had once, consenting, been gently boiled. A flowing blue tie, freely peppered with ample white spots, gave a Bohemian touch to ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... do we recognize the budding of Hawthorne's genius. This clear introspective analysis is the foundation of all true mental power, and Hawthorne might have become a Platonic philosopher, if he had not preferred to ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... with a sense of being right on the fringe of a new and a great perception. Young Arkwright, the old Captain, the whole South, were unfolding themselves in a vast answer, when a movement outside the window caught the negro's introspective eyes. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... the writer finds himself working long hours day after day with no sense of mental fatigue, but a certain unusual gaiety of heart accompanying the successive days, as if life were on the whole rather a lark, he, being accurately introspective, and not easily deceived into optimistic conclusions, is forced to give the whole credit for this change of spirit to the functioning of the new glands, and he is confirmed in this conclusion by the fact that the high blood pressure, which was noticeable enough before the operation, ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... not of the character which lauded itself, indeed he was never introspective nor thought of himself at all. He was just strong and living and breathing, his actions governed by an inherited sense of the fitness of things for a gentleman's code, which, unless it was swamped, as on one occasion it had been by violent ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... a small diary of this date, I was neither an introspective youth nor one given to ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... to see me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene in the corner. Then he stood before the fire, and looked me over in his singular introspective fashion. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... timidly at her husband's astonished face, as he threw off his waterproof and laid down his carpet-bag. Her own face was a little flurried with excitement, and his, half hidden in his tawny beard, and, possibly owing to his self-introspective nature, never spontaneously sympathetic, still expressed only wonder! Mrs. Rylands was a little frightened. It is sometimes dangerous to meddle with a man's habits, even when he has ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... grace, intense emotion, and melancholy refinement. In Hamlet, Richelieu, Othello, Iago, Lear, Bertuccio, and Lucius Brutus they were conspicuously manifest. But the controlling attribute,—that which imparted individual character, colour and fascination to his acting,—was the thoughtful introspective habit of a stately mind, abstracted from passion and suffused with mournful dreaminess of temperament. The moment that charm began to work, his victory was complete. It was that which made him the true image of Shakespeare's ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... well be believed that after the scene in the garden he had rated, satirised, examined himself in the most approved introspective style. One half of him declared that scene to have been the heights of melodramatic absurdity; the other thought of it with a thrill of tender gratitude towards the young pitiful creature who had evoked it. After all, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the present volume, reveals a true insight into the personality of this unfortunate and great artist, and removes any false misconceptions which unsympathetic and superficial handling may have engendered. Indeed, the same introspective faculty is displayed in all the other essays which form this volume, which, it is believed, will prove of the greatest value not only to the professional student, but also to the intelligent listener, for whom the present series of volumes ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... question of morals or social ethics; he simply calculated the mathematical amount of happiness possible to the individual. That was all there was in life. Had he lived a generation or two earlier, he would have pursued his way along the paths of the prohibited without introspective analysis; but being the intellectual young man of the latter decades of the 19th century, it amused him to season his defiance of certain conventional codes with the ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... emphasize the superiority of history over fiction as dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned was a Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows itself in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective metaphysics; and in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... still hours and days set apart for the severe inward scrutiny of motives and "frames" and the grounds of one's hope. However truly the church of to-day may judge that the piety of their fathers was disproportioned and morbidly introspective and unduly concerned about one's own salvation, it is none the less true that the reaction from its excesses is violent, and is providing for itself a new reaction. "The contemplative orders," whether among Catholics or Protestants, do not find the soil and climate of America congenial. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... The phlegmatic type is impassive, unemotional, slow to anger, but not of great kindness, persistent in pursuing his purposes. The sanguine type is optimistic, impressionable, enthusiastic, but unsteady. The melancholic type is pessimistic, introspective, moody, suspicious of the motives of others. Most pupils belong to more than one class. Perhaps the two most prominent types represented in school are (1) that variety of the sanguine temperament which leads the individual ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... myself, Dora let herself loose and told us much of Lucy's history, or, rather, of her own history as Lucy's mother. In her crude, lumbering way and with flushed cheeks she talked with profound frankness and quaint introspective insight, in the manner of one touching upon things that are enshined in innermost recesses ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... with him. Slowly the sparkle point of consciousness and identity that was John Tarwater sank, deeper and deeper, into the profounds of his being that had been compounded ere man was man, and while he was becoming man, when he, first of all animals, regarded himself with an introspective eye and laid the beginnings of morality in foundations of nightmare peopled by the monsters of his own ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... Meredith grew more introspective in his later years, as is shown in such long, analytical novels as, One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894), and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... sexual disturbances have led them to devour omnivorously and unscientifically the psychopathological literature of sex by such authors as Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, and Freud, are probably unsafe teachers of sex-hygiene. Especially is this true of the women of this type whose introspective morbidity has led them to diagnose their own functional disturbances as the direct result of "over-sexuality" and restraint from normal sexual expression—a diagnosis that is probably wrong nine times ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... into Marjorie's face since she closed her books; it was not when she opened the Bible. Was the child enduring any spiritual conflicts again? Linnet had never had spiritual conflicts; what should she do with this too introspective Marjorie? Would Prue grow up to ask questions and need just such comforting, too? Miss Prudence's own evening's work had begun with her Bible reading, she read and meditated all the hour and a quarter ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... who marry young are entitled, I think, to a certain amount of introspective treatment by their authors. Without some knowledge of their mental working it is not very easy for the reader to have patience with them. I was introduced to Anne (HEINEMANN) when she was fifteen, and in the act of snatching a loaf of bread from a baker's cart and running away ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... little, just dimly, he told himself humbly, what the sight of suffering was to her, and she had stood up to it. She, with her passion for animals; she, with her tender, tender heart! Larry, who believed himself to be profoundly introspective, did not know that it was his own flawless physical courage, finding and recognising its fellow in Christian, that had first lit the flame. He thought it was her face, with its delicate charm, its faint, elusive loveliness, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... for the benefit of his children. Scotch thrift was well exemplified in them both. But in the course of 1887 James Gilmour became troubled about this accumulation of even that small sum which he could call his own. In his lonely introspective Mongolian life the possession of money came to wear in his view the aspect of distrusting God. At this juncture the London Missionary Society was in a somewhat serious state as regards funds. A special appeal had been sent out indicating that if additional funds ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... poets whose first concern is not their personal fate, their own unhappiness, it may be, but who see first and foremost the sad fate of humanity and regard their own misfortunes merely as a part of the common destiny. The representatives of the second type are those introspective natures who are first and chiefly aware of their own misery and finally come to regard it as representative of universal evil. The former proceed from the general to the particular, the latter from the particular to the general. But that these types must necessarily be entirely distinct ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... though it was a garment of fire; but to stand aside in irksome leisure was a harder trial, at which he trembled. This was the new complication in which Gerald asked his brother's sympathy and counsel. It was a long letter, curiously introspective, and full of self-argument; and it was hard work, with a mind so occupied as was that of the Perpetual Curate, to give it due attention. He put it away when he had done with his cold breakfast, and deferred the consideration of the subject, with a kind of vague hope that the family ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... lines that mark the concealment and disclosure of breast and back. There is no expression of immodesty. The woman of the Philippines is sad as she is swarthy, and her melancholy eyes are almost always introspective, or glancing far away, and revising the disappointed dreams of long ago. Profounder grief than is read in the faces of bronze and copper no mourning artist has wrought nor gloomy poet written. Below the jacket, the everlasting blazer, is a liberal width of ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... periods in our lives: the youth period or prospective period, the adult or introspective period, and the old age ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... tragedy in its way. The little citizen in spectacles, who had been standing on the opposite corner vacantly eating an apple out of a paper bag, had unwisely chosen his moment to try the crossing. He was evidently an indoors sort of man and no shakes at crossing streets, owing to the introspective nature of his mind. A grocery wagon shaved him by an inch. It was doing things to the speed-limit, this wagon, because a dashing police patrol was close behind, treading on its tail and indignantly clanging ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... we train our girls so that they may have just judgments and yet not make them so introspective that the bloom shall be brushed off the beauty of every action? Perhaps Emerson's suggestion, that every young person should be encouraged to do what he is afraid to do, would meet ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... these introspective periods Alaire telephoned Dave Law, arguing to herself that she must learn more about her husband's connection with the Lewis gang. Dave arrived even sooner than she had expected. She made him dine with her, and they spent the evening on the ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... his cheating and swindling which added to his undoubted pleasure in lying. His peculiar career was much furthered by the possession of a fluent style and a good memory through which his creations were built up in most plausible fashion. He proved to be willingly introspective and stated that his inclination to lie was a puzzle to him, and that while he was engaged in prevarications he believed in them. He always was the hero of his own stories. He further declared that inner unrest and love of wandering drove him forth even ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... the land ground out "Soldiers of the Queen" and "The Absent-minded Beggar." Then the world went mad and mafficked, felt a little ashamed of itself, and became, for the first time for years, rather usefully introspective and self-critical. And "Nicky ... Nicky ... Nicky ..." beat out every swing of the pendulum of ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... stock, and him the gods of life cherished, so that all the forces of the young land about him were as his own. Yet, though his pulses rhymed to theirs he did not perceive his relation to them: neither he nor the land was yet become introspective. So informed was he with the impetuous spirit of youth that the least manifestation of life found its answering thrill in him. And it was sufficient to feel this. There was no time barren enough of sensation to reason about ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... tone and colour. A marvellous poet, a precise sober workman of art, with a peasant strain in him like Millet, and, like Millet, very near to the soil; a natural man, yet crossed by nature with a perverse strain; the possessor of a sensibility exalted, and dolorous; morbid, sick-nerved, and as introspective as Heine; a visionary and a lover of life, very close to the periphery of things; an interpreter of Baudelaire; Dante's alter ego in his vast grasp of the wheel of eternity, in his passionate fling at nature; withal a sculptor, always profound and ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... personable man himself. He was tall and broad shouldered, with abundant brown hair and beard, and a winning smile. His eyes were dark and introspective, but they could glow like sunlit topaz, or grow dim with tears, as his congregation had opportunity to observe during this first sermon—but they ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... still has a few thorns. She finds out also that the long day, when husband is at business, affords many opportunities for reflection and serious thought. These moments of seeming leisure are the moments of destiny. They are the introspective moments, when she weighs and measures out for herself sympathy, if she is not made of the right stuff, or she makes strong resolutions, and prepares herself mentally to win out in the new life. They are the moments when her subconscious intelligence is ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... had suspicions of Anton. I know that, though he has never asserted them to me in so direct a fashion as apparently he has to you." He paused: then he went on in an introspective manner. "I am getting on in years. I have already had a good innings right here on this ranch. I have watched the country develop. I have seen the settlers come, sow the seeds of their homesteads and small ranches, and watched the crop grow. I have rented them grazing. ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... quality called fudoshin, or immobility of heart. That this existed in practice from an early era cannot be doubted, but its cultivation by a recognized system of training dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the introspective tenet (kwanshin-ho) of the Zen sect of Buddhism taught believers to divest themselves wholly of passion and emotion and to educate a mind unmoved by its environment, so that, in the storm and stress of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... unimaginably complex, delightfully unexplored. I rushed impetuously out of the cage of my provincialism and looked eagerly about the brilliant universe. My question was, What have we here?—not, What does this mean? That query came much later. When I now become retrospectively introspective, I fall into the predicament of the centipede in the rhyme, who got along very smoothly until he was asked which leg came after which, whereupon he became so rattled that he couldn't take a step. I know I have come on a thousand feet, on wings, winds and American ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... a very normal girl: nothing morbid about her, nothing nervous or false or overwrought. You did not expect to find her introspective. You felt sure that her mental life was not at all the result of thoughts and reflections germinating from within, but rather of impressions and sensations that came to her from without. There was nothing extraordinary about Travis. She never had her vagaries, was not moody—depressed one ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... who sways a conscience sways a human life. The man who sways a nation's conscience controls that nation's life. To rule conscience, a man must himself be unprejudiced and well informed. He must strive, not to keep up an unhealthy excitement which shall make conscience introspective and morbid, but to preserve a sane moral outlook, to encourage freedom of thought and judgment, and to develop a normal conscience which reacts promptly against wrong. Conscience measures our inner recoil from evil. The power of a preacher is in direct proportion to the energy ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... on fine mornings, but likely to be unfrequented till the snow melted. Receiving no answer, Bower glanced sharply at his companion; but the old guide might be unaware of his presence, so steadily did he trudge onward, with downcast, introspective eyes. Resolved to make an end of a silence ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... for a moment, reflecting. Extracting a piece of tasteless gum from between his teeth, he deposited it in the grate, where a sickly fire burned; then, tearing the wrapper from a fresh slip, he resumed his chewing and stood looking about him with unseeing eyes. Fierce they were as ever, but introspective in expression. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... James. He had never been involved in such a web of fabrication. He felt his cheeks burning. He was sure that he looked guilty, but Clemency did not seem to notice it. She was reflecting, still with that puzzled knitting of her forehead and that introspective look in her blue eyes. "I wonder if I look in the least like my own mother?" she said in a curious voice, as of ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... walls of a cell. He shrank from it as a sensitive nature shrinks from the melancholy suggestiveness of an open grave, and he could not have told why he felt that strange form of depression. He was wholly unfamiliar with any form of introspective inquiry, any analysis of a mental state. He had never held sad intellectual inquest over a dead hope, nor groped blindly for a ray of light in the inky blackness of a ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... had held to her girlish idea? If she had become a "Sister"? But—she shook her head as she sat there alone—Robin! And then she sighed; she had not thought, "But—Dion!" She was almost angry with herself for being so introspective, so mentally observant of herself. All this was surely unnatural in her. Was she going to become morbid—she who had such a hatred of morbidity? She tried to force herself to feel that she had missed Dion tremendously, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... it was natural that I should regard Mr. Wentworth with stimulated curiosity. As I met him from day to day, passing through the Common with that same introspective air, there was something in his loneliness which touched me. I wondered that I had not read before in his pale, meditative face some such sad history as Mr. H——— had confided to me. I formed the resolution of speaking to him, though with no very lucid purpose. ...
— A Struggle For Life • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... characteristics. It, no doubt, like all religions, lays down rules for the government of thought and feeling, but these are of a very general character. Preeminently a regulator of conduct, it lays comparatively little stress upon the inner life. It discourages, or at least neglects that minutely introspective habit of thought which the confessional is so much calculated to promote, which appears so prominently in the writings of the Catholic Saints, and which finds its special representation in the mystics and the religious contemplative orders. Improved ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the legislator, by the spirit of exclusiveness and domination of those that count themselves pillars of orthodoxy; to the philosopher, by the restraints on the freedom of learning and teaching which every Church exercises, when it is strong enough; to the conscientious soul, by the introspective hunting after sins of the mint and cummin type, the fear of theological error, and the overpowering terror of possible damnation, which have accompanied the Churches like their shadow, I need not now consider; but they are assuredly not small. If agnostics lose heavily on the one side, they ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... power of looking back, and I knew that, in the first instance, I had been led by religious enthusiasm to adopt that mode of life. I should be in the world but not of it; I should have more time for that introspective contemplation the aim and end of which is mental absorption in the divine Brahma; besides which, people would praise me, and all the world would know that I was a holy man. But the strangest part of the affair remains to ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... I have known him tear up his weight ticket when he had gained an ounce or two instead of losing one or two pounds. We began by taking our walks together, but his conversation used to get so physically introspective that one couldn't get in a word about one's ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... every one who loves the truth has the privilege of using for the sake of his own growth and wilfulness, and circumstances often turn it full upon us, greatly to our advantage, if we do not wince but act upon the knowledge that it brings. It is possible to acquire an introspective habit which is wholesome and true, and brings us every day a better sense of ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... him without speaking. Neeld hastily restored his paper to a position more befitting its dignity and became apparently absorbed in an article on Shyness in Elephants; the subject was treated with a wealth of illustration and in a vein of introspective philosophy exceedingly instructive. But it was all wasted on Mr Neeld. He was waiting for Iver; no man could be so silent unless he had something important to say or to leave unsaid. And Iver was not even smoking the cigar which he always smoked after tea. Neeld could bear it no longer; ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... upon the great leather chair by the hearth, and her expression changed as she gave an uncontrollable shudder. It was in that chair her father had been found on that fateful morning, about a week ago, clad still in the dinner-clothes of the previous evening, a faint, introspective smile upon his keen, inscrutable face; his eyes wide, with a politely inquiring stare, as if he had looked upon things which until then had been withheld from his vision. She walked over to the chair, and laid her hand where his head had rested. Then, all at once, the ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... fugitive articles to various papers and magazines, and was generally spoken of by the inner circle of the craft as "a rising man," and a man to be afraid of. Henley was full of common-sense, only moderately introspective, facile, and vivacious. He might be trusted to tincture a book with the popular element, and yet not to spoil it; for his literary sense was keen, despite his jocular leaning toward the new humour. He lacked ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... him with soft violet eyes—and it was as though some psychic bathhouse attendant had poured ice water down his spine. For he had seen that look before, that liquid introspective look in the velvet eyes of cattle. He shivered. For a moment he had been thinking of them as human. And somehow the lack of that indefinable some thing called humanity robbed them of much of their glamour. They were still beautiful, but their beauty ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... one who is what is popularly known as a drunkard not so much ashamed of as interested in himself; isn't that it? Well, that comes of the introspective literary temperament. It is only the oyster fascinated by the pearl that is ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... brothers, and true huskies both. Sons of the one mother though they were, they were as different as day and night. Billee's one fault was his excessive good nature, while Joe was the very opposite, sour and introspective, with a perpetual snarl and a malignant eye. Buck received them in comradely fashion, Dave ignored them, while Spitz proceeded to thrash first one and then the other. Billee wagged his tail appeasingly, ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... Syme, who was standing as if blind with introspective thought, swung round and cried out, like a ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... disciplined. As a result they begin to misinterpret things in the environment and see in these disciplinary measures nothing but persecution on the part of the prison officials. They become suspicious, seclusive, introspective, spend sleepless nights, until suddenly, in the stillness of night, they perceive isolated phonemes. This strengthens their suspicions. They refuse food, become apprehensive, the hallucinations reach a more definite character, ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... M. Degas—Gustave Moreau—Solomon had much in common, but the colour of the English Hebrew is much finer, and his themes are less monotonous. I can imagine many people being repelled by this troubled introspective art, especially at the present day. There is hardly room for an inverted Watts. At the same time, even those who from age and training cannot take a sentimental interest in faded rose-leaves, whose perfume is a little overpowering, may care to explore an interesting byway ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... and come. I am going through the city first, and we can have some lunch on the way. I observe that there is a good deal of German music on the programme, which is rather more to my taste than Italian or French. It is introspective, and I want to ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... and meaning of Christ's Vicarship, which he had so wantonly abused and dishonoured, and considered that to that Judge before whom he was summoned to appear the sins of his predecessors would be no justification or mitigation of his own. It may well be that, grown introspective upon his bed of death, he tardily sought to thrust from his mind the worldly things that had so absorbed it until the spiritual were forgotten, and had given rise to all the scandal concerning him that was spread through Christendom, to ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... to-day has many characteristics: but its central note is the dominant influence of Sociology—enthusiasm for social truths as an instrument of social reform. It is scientific, subjective, introspective, historical, archaeological:—full of vitality, versatility, and diligence:—intensely personal, defiant of all law, of standards, of convention:—laborious, exact, but often indifferent to grace, symmetry, or colour:—it is learned, critical, cultured:—with ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... very good; voice a trifle weak and suggesting timidity and feeble initiative. Introspective; a little self-conscious, and unimportant nervous symptoms indicated by ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... penetrate into the mind; engross the thoughts. Adj. thinking &c. v.; thoughtful, pensive, meditative, reflective, museful[obs3], wistful, contemplative, speculative, deliberative, studious, sedate, introspective, Platonic, philosophical. lost in thought &c. (inattentive) 458; deep musing &c. (intent) 457. in the mind, under consideration. Adv. all things considered. Phr. the mind being on the stretch; the mind turning upon, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in love with himself than he ever was with any woman. There are men, you know, whose one grand passion in life is for themselves. But Alice knows that Brandt still cares for her, and she feeds her romantic fancy on this fact, and has her introspective miseries to her heart's content. She is far too cool-headed a woman to do anything rash. Sometimes I think her morbid nature obtains more real satisfaction out of her joyless situation than positive happiness would compensate her for. She appears to take a certain negative pleasure ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... not as hard as a stone," he went on in the same introspective voice, and looking as if his heart were lying as heavy as a stone in that unwarmed breast of which he spoke. "No, not so hard. But how to prove what you give me credit for—ah! that's another question. No one has ever expected such ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... of his appeal to the universal sentiments of comedy and pathos. Scott's influence, somewhat checked during the growth of these reputations and the succession of fertile and accomplished writers on both sides of the Atlantic,—including the introspective analysts of the past fifteen years,—has within a decade been rising again, and has lately burst forth in a new group of historical romancers who seem to have "harked back" from the subjective fad of our day to Scott's healthy, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... place as any to emphasize the fact that the introspective study of mental imagery has little to contribute to the measurement of intelligence. Intelligence tests are concerned with the total result of a thought process, rather than with the imagery supports ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... "The Wanderer", is one of the many introspective passages in the work, and is full of innuendos and hints as to the Nietzschean ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... they are the three distinct and independent kingdoms, and turn our introspective gaze upon the kingdom of France. There we recognize the same fact; there the same work of dismemberment is going on. About the end of the ninth century there were already twenty-nine provinces or fragments of provinces which had become petty states, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... progressive principle in nature. After the long insensibility, spring was having her way with him, as she was having it with the grass and the flowers and the bloom on the trees. It was one of those moments of awakening, of ecstatic vision, which come only to introspective and imaginative minds—to minds that have known darkness as well as light. In that instant of realization, he knew, beyond all doubt, that he stood not for the past, but for the future, that he stood not for philosophy, but for adventure—for ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... the table. Mr. Rastall-Retford, having taken the last trick, had gathered it up in the introspective manner of one planning big coups, and was brooding tensely, with knit brows. His mother was frowning over her ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... world of understandable things. Miller, slouching in his chair, with a cheap tie-clip showing underneath his waistcoat, a bulging mass of sock descending over the top of his boot, rolling a cigarette with yellow-stained, objectionable fingers, still involved him in introspective speculation as to real values ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was so thoroughly disgusted with it as a German that personal grievances were far from necessary to fortify her for the momentous role she was to play with the dawn; but in this rare hour of leisure it amused her naturally introspective mind to rehearse certain episodes whose sum had made her what ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... than the typical English village. The Rocky Mountains, that traditional stamping-ground for the heartbroken, may be well enough in their way; but a lover has to be cast in a pretty stem mould to be able to be introspective when at any moment he may meet an annoyed cinnamon bear. In the English village there are no such obstacles to meditation. It combines the comforts of civilization with the restfulness of solitude in a manner equalled by no other spot except the New York Public Library. Here your lover ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... than a man's, and whose habit of self-control is less formed, a sudden shock will upset his mental balance. Sometimes a very egotistical man will succumb to danger long drawn out. The same applies to men who are very introspective. I have seen a man of obviously low intelligence break down on the eve of an attack. The anticipation of danger makes many men "windy," especially officers who are responsible for other lives than their own. But even where men are afraid ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... Then his introspective mind, which had been trained in the Aristotelian dialectic, began to examine his opponent's point of view. A merciful loving Heavenly Father might very well smile at the follies and weaknesses of His human children; why, then, should we not ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... of your self-distrust! You—reign? Come, come! You would be pale and wan; One of those timid, introspective kings Who are imprisoned lest ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... accounted for by the consciousness of birth, which naturally broadened as I approached Runnymede. I thereupon resolved myself into a committee of inquiry, and, applying the analytical system befitting these introspective investigations, discovered, in the first place, furtively underlying my philosophy, a latent ambition to be regarded as a final authority on things in general. Hitherto this aspiration had fallen short, partly owing to the clinging sediment of my congenital ignorance, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... The sense of sight; (2) the sense of hearing; (3) the sense of smell; (4) the sense of taste; (5) the sense of touch; (6) Mano-vijnyana (lit., mind-knowledge), or the perceptive faculty; (7) Klista-mano-vijnyana (lit., soiled-mind-knowledge), or an introspective faculty; (8) Alaya-vijnyana (lit., ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... fully understand, but I think from things he has said, that as a boy he was jealous of my father. This feeling would naturally make him, when it came to the test, not unwilling to believe in his guilt. Then, being reticent and introspective, he magnified all this a thousandfold when the truth came out, and he realised he had profited by the unjust suspicion. By dwelling upon it he came to feel as if he had actually obtained the money himself by unfair means. But ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... enlightenment of others, and is the first vestige of a diary which has been found. But it seems plain that his longing for what he continually calls "communion," and the effort to divine the will of Providence in his regard, must frequently have urged him to that introspective self-contemplation so common to natures like his before their time for action has arrived. We make some brief extracts from this document which illustrates, still more plainly than any of the letters, the fact that the interior pressure to which he was subjected ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... for this fact to be communicated to Mr. Heatherbloom. Though she shifted her figure often, as if to call attention to the pale profile of her face against a leaden sky, his thoughts remained introspective. Only the sky-line seemed to interest him. But one day something white came dancing in the breeze to his feet. Absorbed in deep neutral tones afar, he did not see it; his four-footed charges, however, were ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... other half over him by way of bed-clothes, covering himself entirely, and feeling, physically, as comfortable as ever he had been in his life. Inward melancholy it was impossible for a man like Oak, introspective far beyond his neighbours, to banish quite, whilst conning the present untoward page of his history. So, thinking of his misfortunes, amorous and pastoral, he fell asleep, shepherds enjoying, in common with sailors, the privilege ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... vivid force of an idea. Trollope would give the idea a decent funeral for the sake of having his adverb appear at the grave above reproach from grammatical gossip. Whenever I have risen from the splendid psychological perspective of old Job, the solemn introspective howls of Ecclesiasticus and the generous living philosophy of Shakespeare it has always been with the desire—of course it is undignified, but it is human—to go and get an English grammar for the pleasure of spitting upon it. Let us be honest. I understand everything about grammar ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... Perhaps I am not so impulsive—you see, I am years older now—perhaps I am more selfish. I don't know which it is and—I can't express my feelings, but I have had sufficient time since you went away to think and to look into my own soul. Really I have become quite introspective. Of course, my feeling for you is just the same as it was, dear, but I—I can't—" She waved a graceful hand to indicate her surroundings. "Well, this is my world, and I am a part of it. You understand, don't ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... was in the introspective mood in which a man pays no attention to his listener as he cons over his secret thoughts, I remained silent, and, seating myself upon the bed, continued to watch ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... the pain became intense, and fever set in. Dr. Kendrick was summoned; and, though the case was severe, it had no alarming symptoms at first. Jack went to and fro with his merry whistle; speculative he might be, but he was not introspective or morbid: wife and mother watched ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... life, was genuine in his scorn of the insinuation that he proposed to live on Joanna's money. He verily believed himself capable of reattaining fame and fortune. It was only the nuisance of having to do so that, at introspective times, disconcerted him. He knew that to break away from a thirteen-year-old habit of idleness would need considerable effort. But he was a man, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... in them. It is very probable that in Nyaya the cultivation of the art of inference was originally pre-eminent and metaphysics was deduced later by an application of the inferential method which gave the introspective method but little scope for its application, so that inference came in to explain even perception (e.g. this is a jug since it has jugness) and the testimony of personal psychological experience was taken only as a supplement to corroborate the results arrived at by inference and was not used to ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... that you and me mightn't cotton to," said her husband. "This man is Jack Hamlin." As his wife's remote and introspective black eyes returned only vacancy, he added ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... he had gone over a hundred times. Three days ago he had made his choice, he had no intention of departing from it. For good or ill the thing must go forward now. And, after all, the ultimate decision did not lie with him. Admitting it his thoughts became introspective. Throughout his deliberations he had put self on one side, there had been no question of his own wishes; now for the first time he allowed personal considerations to rise unchecked. For what did he hope? He knew the reason of his reluctance to reach the house—he desired success ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... who were watching him noticed a sudden change in Lovell's face. The good humor and bonhomie called up by this last evening amongst his old friends had disappeared. His face had fallen into graver lines, his eyes seemed fixed with a curious introspective steadiness on a huge calendar which hung from the wall. When at last he turned towards Aynesworth, his tone was ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a long walk. She preferred to go alone so she would not have to talk. Hers was one of those lonely, introspective natures that resent the intrusion of aimless chatter when preoccupied with serious thoughts. Long Island was unknown territory to her and it all looked very flat and uninteresting, but she loved the country and found keen delight in the fresh, pure air and the sweet scent ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... nations as to individuals that a period devoted to recovery from internal disorders is followed by a time of great productive and expansive power. The introspective epoch gives place to one of practical achievement. Faust gives up his barren speculations and feels his way from thought to action. From "In the beginning was the Word" he wins his way onward through "the Thought" and "the Might," until he rewrites the dictum "In the beginning was the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... M'Barka's eyes became introspective, as if she waited for a message, or saw a vision. She was as strange, as remote from modern womanhood as a Cassandra. Presently she started, and began trailing her brown fingers lightly over the sand, pressing them down suddenly now and then, until she had ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... effect of such a faith upon the sensitive nerves of the women of those days? Viewed in its larger aspects this was an objective, not a subjective religion. It could but make the sensitive soul super-sensitive, introspective, morbidly alive to uncanny and weird suggestions, and strangely afraid of the temptation of enjoying earthly pleasures. Its followers dared not allow themselves to become deeply attached to anything temporal; for such an emotion was the device of the devil, and God would surely remove the ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... reached a certain degree of emotional tension; that this paralleling of Lincoln's own experience in the experience of the friend so like himself, broke tip for once the solitude of his inner life and delivered him from some dire inward terror. Both men were deeply introspective. Each had that overpowering sense of the emotional responsibilities of marriage, which is bred in the bone of certain hyper-sensitive types—at least in the Anglo-Saxon race. But neither realized this trait in himself until, having blithely pursued his impulse to the point of committal, ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... another man. Pixie had enough knowledge of her own nature to realise that she could be happy in giving Stanor a happiness which he could only gain through her. It was as natural to her to be happy as for a flower to lift its face in the sun, but for both the sun was needed. A more introspective soul would have realised that there were degrees in happiness, and that she would be missing the best; Pixie with characteristic simplicity accepted what seemed to her the right step, and shut her ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... philosophers—more deeply, perhaps, than any aspect of experience—but their conception of it will be a corollary of their metaphysics and epistemology. The remainder of the field of the old philosophical psychology, the introspective and experimental analysis of special states of mind, is already the province of a natural science which is becoming more and more free from the stand-point and ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... secretiveness when he thought it necessary and desirable to do so in furtherance of his darling ambition—the restoration of this title. Men who lead a solitary, self-contained life, like my brother, become introspective and ultra-sensitive, and face any intimate personal revelation with the utmost reluctance. They will nerve themselves to it when the occasion absolutely requires, but the after effects—the mental self-probings, the agonized self torture that a self-conscious proud man can inflict ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... of different sort, whose tuneful dactylic quatrains contain much noble and appropriate metaphor. In the final line the word "re-cleaned" should read "re-cleansed". "In Passing By", by Sophie Lea Fox, is a meritorious poem of the thoughtful, introspective type, which has been previously honoured with professional publication. "A Time to Sing", by M. B. Andrews, introduces to the United another genuine poet of worth. The lines are happy in inspiration and finished in form, having only one possible defect, the use of "heralding" as a dissyllable. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... I who changed them! The shock of poverty was terrible at first, not because I set too much value on money, nor because I was unwilling to work, but because I felt I had no power of attack. My nature was introspective, I lived in an epic of my own creation. My strength and my courage were wrapped up in dreams, and seemed to have no relation to the practical world. I could have faced the devil himself for an ideal, but to make my own living—that was ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... years old, was housed like a supernumerary in a small furnished room on the second floor above the ground. At this time his physique was that of a young man of medium height, slight, pale, and nervous, sensitive in disposition, reserved and introspective in habit. His delicate features, his intelligent forehead surmounted by soft chestnut hair, his pathetic blue eyes, his curved, dissatisfied mouth, shaded by a slight, dark moustache, indicated a melancholy, unquiet temperament and ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... But failure will always be secured, while the huge majority of authors do not aim high, but aim at being a little lower than the last domestic drivel which came out in three volumes, or the last analysis of the inmost self of some introspective young girl which crossed the water from ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... he was much too happy to be lonely or introspective. Brian's absence and his splendid, sacrificial freak of service, had been the price of Joan's content and the welfare of ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Father, who did not like people to be too introspective and self-tormenting, said that they should, however, walk as it is written of the Maccabees, Caute et ordinate;[1] that is, with circumspection and order, or, to use a common expression, "bridle in hand." And one of the best proofs of our advancement in virtue is, he said, a love of correction ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... wherever she went, and she regarded it as a garb of honor that marked her as belonging to the daughters of the great King. You could not call such a life an austere or unnatural one. It was too thoroughly filled with thoughts of love to others to be either morbid or introspective. I obtained my first favorable impressions of the usefulness of deaconesses and their importance to the Church from the cheerful, contented labors of Sister Myrtha and her associates among the poor and sick of Zuerich—quiet women, of no particular prominence in the social world, and not learned ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... this particular evening it is as though some shadow had fallen upon the little camp. Nothing tangible—nothing that changed the general habits or surroundings—but a vague regret and introspective sadness upon the faces of two young men, usually full of careless content. Cecil Stanley, the more refined, a gentleman by birth and education, lounged low in his chair, with his hands behind his head and his feet on the table, and ever ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... to blame, though, or you would be different," he added, with a dark, introspective look. "I was proud of you as a beautiful child, and tried to win your love by indulgence. Heaven knows, I would like to be a different man, but it's all a breathless hurry after bubbles that vanish when grasped! Well, what do you propose to ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... this purpose scarcely suitable. In some departments the science of the Greeks was remarkable, though it is completely overshadowed by their philosophy; yet it was largely based on what has proved to be a wrong method of procedure, viz the introspective and conjectural, rather than the inductive and experimental methods. They investigated Nature by studying their own minds, by considering the meanings of words, rather than by studying things and recording phenomena. This wrong (though by no means, on the face of it, absurd) method ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge |
