Inner Life Quotes

The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstance.

The greatest events-they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.

Real life is the life that's in you, not your circumstances, like where you live or what job you have or who you're in relationship with.

The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant. The further off, the nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper.

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.

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.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.

But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?

There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.

Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror

Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge college is as solitary as a dervis in the desert.

And don't think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. It's quiet, but the roots are down there riotous.

Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees.

I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.

There is nothing more difficult to find than oneself.

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

Sell your clothes- keep your thoughts.

One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.

You fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only.

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.

If your inner life is not producing what you would like on the outside, don't be discouraged... just be willing to change.

The whole of the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if not more, which the day did not bring forth.