Turning Inward Quotes & Sayings

By the time they were pulling into the parking lot of the A&P, the mood was fading, the moment gone. Amy could feel it go. Perhaps it was nothing more than the two doughnuts expanding in her stomach full of milk, but Amy felt a heaviness begin, a familiar turning of some inward tide. As they drove over the bridge the sun seemed to move from a cheerful daytime yellow to an early-evening gold; painful how the gold light hit the riverbanks, rich and sorrowful, drawing from Amy some longing, a craving for joy. — Elizabeth Strout

People look at rights as if they were muscles - the more you exercise them, the better they get. — Antonin Scalia

Turning inward does not have anything to do with thoughts, ideas, opinions, or philosophies. It has nothing to do with the psychological activity of your mind. Enhancing your perception means enhancing your ability to receive life, just as it is. If you are willing to dedicate just a few minutes of your life to this every day, you would see the change. The simple process of paying a little bit of attention to your inner nature will transform the quality of your life in remarkable ways. Sadhana — Sadhguru

I've learned that turning inward is where you develop emotional awareness. This is the place where you connect with your soul, to God and nothing (no thing) can come between you and your source. — Alice Hocker

Damn everything but the circus! ... damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, damn everything that won't get into the circle, that won't enjoy. That won't throw it's heart into the tension, surprise, fear and delight of the circus, the round world, the full existence ... — E. E. Cummings

Why in the case of the ear, is there withdrawal and turning inward, a making resonant, but in the case of the eye, there is manifestation and display, a making evident? — Jean-Luc Nancy

The orange turns to dull bronze light and continues to show what it has shown all day long, but now it seems to show it without enthusiasm. Across those dry hills, within those little houses in the distance are people who've been there all day long, going about the business of the day, who now find nothing unusual or different in this strange darkening landscape, as we do. If we were to come upon them early in the day they might be curious about us and what we're here for. but now in the evening they'd just resent our presence. The workday is over. It's time for supper and family and relaxation and turning inward at home. We ride unnoticed down this empty highway through this strange country I've never seen before, and now a heavy feeling of isolation and loneliness becomes dominant and my spirits wane with the sun. — Robert M. Pirsig

The World card shows the fully balanced and integrated human as the Wiseone pictured in the Hermit card. Wiseones are those human beings who have married their Selves and become fully unified, living, flesh-and-blood manifestations of the Divine presence, described in the Qabalah as the Shekinah, derived from the Hebrew verb shakhan, "to dwell." Persons of this stature live on Earth, yet are validated by and depend upon the greater world (the universe) alone, shown by the fact that they are supported by and dance on air (another reference to the Fool and Spirit). They continually turn inward and upward to their God/dess Self and the Source, while turning outward and downward to the work of the everyday world at hand. Wiseones embody the concept "Trust in the universe and it will support you! — Joseph P. Nolen

[Heraclitus] did not require humans or their sort of knowledge, since everything into which one may inquire he despises [as being] in contrast [to his own] inward-turning wisdom. [To him] all learning from others is a sign of nonwisdom, because the wise man focuses his vision on his own intelligence. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I was never good at painting. The great turning point came when I had a block of wood and I carved a shape into the wood and put a small piece of timber into that space - like a negative - and so it made an endless column, only inward. — Carl Andre

Dancing of late years has been degraded to the narrow limits and low professionalism of mere mechanical proficiency, associated with the most frivolous ... phases of the stage. But this day is fading ... We are turning our gaze inward, learning to seek there the divine sources of the dance, to the end that it may flower into new and more glorious forms of beauty and wealth — Ruth St. Denis

Isn't the easiest thing at this point to start living in a guarded, safe, controlled way? To sop taking risks and to be ruled by our fears of what could happen? Turning inward is one way to respond; the other is to acknowledge our lack of control and reach out for God's help. IF life were stable, I'd never need God's help. Since it's not, I reach out for Him regularly. I am thankful for the unknowns and that I don't have control because it makes me run to God. — Francis Chan

I too have known the inward disturbance of exile,
The great peril of being at home nowhere,
The dispersed center, the dividing love;
Not here, nor there, leaping across ocean,
Turning, returning to each strong allegiance;
American, but with this difference - parting. — May Sarton

I believe that it may be normal, healthy, and even productive to experience mild to moderate depression from time to time as part of the variable emotional spectrum, either as an appropriate response to situations or as a way of turning inward and mentally chewing over problems to find solutions. — Andrew Weil

To achieve that state of lasting happiness and absolute peace, we must first know how to calm the mind, to concentrate and go beyond the mind. By turning the mind's concentration inward, upon the self, we can deepen that experience of perfect concentration. This is the state of Meditation. — Sivananda

Imagine the wheel of time turning in a seemingly endless round, revealing that the beginning is the end of another beginning. This is the cyclic nature of the inward journey of creativity, which is by nature back and down - back in time and down into the soul's depths. — Phil Cousineau

A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward, turning into my own / turning on in / to my own self / at last / turning out of the / white cage, turning out of the / lady cage / turning at last. — Maggie Nelson

Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable. To avoid this condition, people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is readily available, as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative feelings. This explains why such a huge proportion of time is invested in watching television, despite the fact that it is very rarely enjoyed. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I'm not what you'd call a fearless type of person. — Jon Ronson

Every Inch of the Way is a great page turning adventure which is as close as you can get, without actually saddling up and pedalling yourself into the unknown. It takes real magic to turn a great adventure, into a great book. For one thing, most people can't relate to the mindset of the long distance cyclist and I found myself laughing along to Tom's thoughts and observations, wondering if they were in - jokes, shared by those who had seen the world at the speed of a bike, for example his relationship with Serbia's stray dogs! . But his anecdotes have a great balance of the cultures and places, as opposed to just inward reflections, so I am sure would be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in travel and human experience. A lovely story, written from the heart. — Mark Beaumont

Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life. Only angels know unrelieved joy-or are able to stand it. Yet we see the books by the mind-healers with their garish titles: "Joy!" "Awakening," and the like; we see them in person in lecture halls or in groups, beaming their particular brand of inward, confident well-being, so that it communicates its unmistakable message: we can do this for you, too, if you will only let us. I have never seen or heard them communicate the dangers of the total liberation that they claim to offer; say, to put up a small sign next to the one advertising joy, carrying some inscription like "Danger: real probability of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there is no turning back." It would be honest and would also relieve them of some of the guilt of the occasional suicide that takes place in therapy. — Ernest Becker

I think people are turning inward more now cause the world's got in such a weird, crazy state. I think its making people think more about their life and what it is really that they are doing. And how do we interact with a world that's going crazy? It's a very important time. — Dave Davies

The writing life is brutal on a wounded mind. It really is. So much time spent alone. So much time spent in self-reflection. Emotional wounds heal in other people's hearts but you have to reopen yours and examine them in order to re-create their painful feelings on the page. Ugly, twisted, vicious thoughts flitter through other people's minds, but you have to seize yours and hold them to the light in order to understand the soul's shadowy corners. You have to shred your comfortable pieties. You have to tear your illusions to feathers and rags. When you're working well, you become bad company, inward-turning, querulous, obsessed. — Andrew Klavan

A compulsive external search only leads us to the interpretation of another's path. True identity and sustained harmony can only be achieved by turning inward, and it is there that you will find every answer that you need to step into enlightenment — Gary Hopkins

Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of he body. 'I feel good here': the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice. — Michel De Certeau

You do not hate anyone you are not capable of loving. Remember that. — Seth

Woman must be the pioneer in this turning inward for strength. In a sense, she has always been the pioneer. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues ... you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity ... you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that. — Flannery O'Connor

Tis legend that there is one true mate for each Keltar Druid, his perfect match, his other half, the one who completes him with her love. If he finds her, they can exchange the Druid binding vows and bind their souls together for all time, through whatever is to come, beyond death, unto eternity." He paused briefly, his gaze turning inward. "If, however," he murmured, "only one of them takes the vow, only that one will be forever bound. The other remains free to love another, if he or she so chooses. — Karen Marie Moning

If nothing's working for you, if you feel as though you're pushing forward against the grain, the most productive and proactive thing you can do is nothing. Nature is turning you inward, to gain power through peace, rather than outward to gain power through activity. — Martha N. Beck

How do you describe emptiness? Is it the air inside a bubble, the darkness in a pocket, snow? I think, yes, I was six when or seven when I first felt it, the dwindling that is depression. — Lauren Slater

Believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can't function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics. — John Elder Robison

Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one's self, to attune to one's subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience. These woman's core sense of shame and their difficulty tolerating painful emotions had led them to avoid turning their attention inward to their internal sense of things. In recovering, they "came to their senses" and learned to trust their sensed experience, in particular their sense of "enoughness"". — Sheila M. Reindl

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it. — Adam Smith

The closer you got to anything beautiful, the less beautiful it became. Allure was in the mystery, not the appearance. — Penelope Douglas