75 Quotes About Inner-life

  • Author Julian Barnes
  • Quote

    He knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn't just about privacy, about an Englishman's home—even a pebbledash semi—being his castle. It was about something more: about the self, and where you kept it, and who, if anyone, was allowed to fully see it.

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  • Author Clarissa Pinkola Estés
  • Quote

    Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women.

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  • Author Josef Pieper
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    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.

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  • Author Siri Hustvedt
  • Quote

    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.

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  • Author Jennifer Giesbrecht
  • Quote

    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.

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