Inner Life Quotes

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other - above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.”
― Albert Einstein

“...I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward.”
― Susan Cain

“You are one thing only. You are a Divine Being. An all-powerful Creator. You are a Deity in jeans and a t-shirt, and within you dwells the infinite wisdom of the ages and the sacred creative force of All that is, will be and ever was.”
― Anthon St. Maarten, Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny

“You are your master. Only you have the master keys to open the inner locks.”
― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

“What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”
― Mark Twain

“Self is a sea boundless and measureless.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“What goes on inside isn't ever the same as what goes on outside.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers

“If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...”
― Alice James

“The victory over our inner self is a daily struggle. Be strong and do not give up.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

“How much she wanted it - that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The strength of every individual is the grace for great work.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one's existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is "possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell.”
― Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation

“The "whole good" cannot be had, it would seem, without mustering all the strength of our inner life. Even in the sphere of external possessions there are goods which inherently demand, if they are to be truly ours, far more of us than mere acquisition. "'My garden,' the rich man said; his gardener smiled.”
― Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation

“...for we have found that by excluding we grow thin inside even though we may have an enormous bank account outside.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“New dispensations may await us; the Kingdom may come in ways we never dreamed of; the beyond may be more momentous than we have ever expected, but always and everywhere 'the within' determines 'the beyond,' and character is destiny.”
― Rufus Matthew Jones, The Inner Life

“A sophisticated person is a combination of analytical reasoning and the secret laws of nature. Our irrationality, the hot paroxysms of the inner life, melts away our concrete protective boarders, enabling us to encounter the beauty of nature, and its molten force supplies the poetic imaginings that fuses life with delightful fragrance.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Everyone has violence in themselves. I'm violent.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“You can learn a lot about someone's inner life if allowed to examine them the way their shadow does – close enough to breathe down their neck, but unnoticed, unremarked upon, invisible.”
― Jennifer Giesbrecht, The Monster of Elendhaven

“Fast is the food that nourishes the inner life.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“If a person’s inner life gets disturbed, his outer life will get disturbed too and he will fail to reflect his inner life to the outer world”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“...Rogers offered this definitive observation to a meeting of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry: "It's easy to convince people that children need to learn the alphabet and numbers...How do we help people to realize that what matters even more than the superimposition of adult symbols is how a person's inner life finally puts together the alphabet and numbers of his outer life? What really matters is whether he uses the alphabet for the declaration of war or the description of a sunrise--his numbers for the final count at Buchenwald or the specifics of a brand-new bridge.”
― Maxwell King, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

“Mary secretly thinks she is pretty and therefore deserves to be loved.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“her eyes closed against some
unimagined darkness, where she is buried in an ache
in which nothing makes
sense.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Lucid dreams show us the inner realities of existence which we have either been too busy or afraid to recognize.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“. . . she also shed her youthful need to exaggerate, flaunt her wit, and trot out erudition. She still sent poems to mark an event or nudge someone to write, but her poems became less about what happened and more about what she was thinking. Poems sent in letters . . . rose above daily concerns to larger contemplations on nature, faith, and loss. Images of boats, sailors, and the view from shore appeared frequently.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Becoming an effective leader who can successfully lead people and organizations begins with having your internal life in order.”
― Benjamin Suulola

“…it is supposed that all this publicity of self-revelation represents an interest in private life . . . It does really imply that nobody has any inner life; that man is not an end to himself, subject only to the glory of God; or, in short, that biography was not made for man but man for biography.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays