Quotes & Sayings About Navel Gazing

I told him I had no use for introspection and navel-gazing. I was probably one of the few New Yorkers who had never been to a therapist. I was not the type to go looking for the causes of all my problems in my childhood, and I had no respect for those who did. — Jan-Philipp Sendker

I want evangelicals to be known not for what they're against, but what they're for. Yes, there are some things that I believe are flat out wrong. There is no doubt about it, and I'm not wishy-washy about it. But my agenda is bigger than simply those issues. My agenda is to be as big as the agenda of Jesus. — Rick Warren

Nothing matters. You get yourself into a state in which you imagine things which have no basis in reality ... One begins for some reason to worry about something and, if one allows oneself to go on doing that, one gradually imagines all kinds of things. It is a kind of self-indulgence and one gets into a perpetual daydream. It is essential to stop this process and face the real world
which is never so bad as all that. — Leonard Woolf

Teachers who pander to minority students by turning their courses into rap sessions and ethnic navel-gazing exercises capture their interest and allegiance. — Thomas Sowell

It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing. — Peter Watts

FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER. FEAR IS THE LITTLE-DEATH THAT BRINGS TOTAL OBLITERATION. — Frank Herbert

We were having another look among the bushes for David's lost worsted ball, and instead of the ball we found a lovely nest made of the worsted, and containing four eggs, with scratches on them very like David's handwriting, so we think they must have been the mother's love-letters to the little ones inside. — J.M. Barrie

There's a nobility in making life smooth and clean and comfortable. It's a choice at least equal to the choice of navel-gazing for a living. — Lauren Groff

They decided now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-quarter room flat, that most people who call themselves 'truth seekers' - persons who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible seperable thing, like houses or salt or bread - did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the 'secret of life' in laboratories which did not seem to be provided wtih Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sorts of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one's navel.
To these high matters Martin responded, 'Rot!' He insisted that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. (260) — Sinclair Lewis

We live in a time where there's a great deal of navel-gazing with the devices that we have that occupy so much of our time ... many subjects of history are lost. — Chin Han

In every decade rock and roll starts to get very serious and navel gazing and kind of self serious and every once and a while it kind of needs a kick in the pants. — Rainn Wilson

Most books that come out with a comedy label seem to be, Eric [WAREHEIM]and I could have written, "This is our story, and this is who we are," and sort of this navel-gazing, narcissistic approach to comedy we're seeing these days. — Tim Heidecker

The final words of a domestic bully: If you leave me now furious angels will descend upon you and bring you back to me. — Patsy Cline

The universe of his own feelings keeps crowding everyone else's out. It is a constant struggle to see other people as people, rather than as denizens of a dimension one level below the one in which he's doomed to wander, imperially alone. That someone close to him might right now be awake in a different part of the city, feeling a pain every bit as real as his own . . . he can think it, but cannot seem to remember it. And is 'remember' even the right word for something for which you have zero empirical evidence? Postulate, maybe. Imagine. He sweeps the lens back toward the window, where the cat hasn't stirred. Her tail twitches. An idea threatens to form, but doesn't. — Garth Risk Hallberg

The afterlife is to die for. — John S. Weiss

A Muslim fanatic and a Christian fanatic, a Jewish fanatic, a secular fanatic, an atheist fanatic, a communist fanatic - all of them are the same. The thinking that, 'If you don't think like me, that if you are not with me, then you are against me;' this is something to condemn. — Marjane Satrapi

'Alpha' is a very fast-moving book. It doesn't lend itself to laborious introspection and the navel-gazing that some stories can fall prey to. — Greg Rucka

The biggest risk is that a lot of people will try to talk you out of pursuing your dream. The world has too many people who are happy to discuss why something might not work, and too few who will cheer you and say, "I'm there for you." The more time you spend navel-gazing, the longer you give those negative gravitational forces to keep you in their tether. — John Wood

When something you make doesn't work, it didn't work, not you. You, you work. You keep trying. — Zach Klein

The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky. — Henry Adams

When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen. — Melissa Febos

Why can I remember eggplant, when I can't remember my own name?! — Carla Cassidy

We have got to be watchful, for I tell you God has sent us here to test us and to prove us. We were true in keeping our first estate. The people that are here today stood loyally by God and by Jesus and they did not flinch. If you had flinched, then you would not be here with the Priesthood upon you. The evidence that you were loyal, that you were true, and that you did not waver is to be found in the fact that you have received the Gospel-and the everlasting Priesthood. — George Q. Cannon

In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences. — Miriam Toews

There was a time when people had the decency to wait until they were approaching 50 to have a mid-life crisis. Now it seems many thirtysomethings find themselves succumbing to existential navel-gazing. — Mark Barrowcliffe

It's amazing how flexible the human mind is in terms of jumping into a backstory or an aside. Vonnegut is a great example - it's not a linear story by any means, but somehow your brain is keeping it moving in one direction even though the story is taking you in all these different directions. — Noah Hawley

It's so frustrating that everybody rags on eighties music, when there's a lot of terrific stuff out there," he said. "There's no irony to it. It's not afraid to just be happy or enthusiastic or earnest. Or to have melody. Sure, you can blame it for being naive, but isn't that refreshing next to the whiny navel-gazing that came after it? — Amanda DeWees