Top 100 Inner Life Quotes
#1. The history of the creative progress of individual artists shows that, along with their spiritual growth and the increasing complexity of their inner life, their forms of expression become more complex.
Mieczyslaw Jastrun
#2. The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.
John B. S. Haldane
#3. The artist must be blind to "recognized" and "unrecognized" form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity.
Wassily Kandinsky
#4. Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.
Erica Jong
#5. Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life.
Maria Montessori
#6. If your outer life is really a reflection of the quality of your inner life, then it's a brilliant move to spend at least an hour a day working on yourself.
Robin Sharma
#7. Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person. It has both emotional and cognitive aspects, involving the ability to tune into the emotions experienced by another.
Jacqui Stedmon
#8. Of all the medicines
In the inner life,
A smile is by far
The best medecine.
Sri Chinmoy
#9. I want to keep an inner life alive and, with luck, somebody else's, too.
Romesh Gunesekera
#10. Love is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life
Gertrude Stein
#11. The inner life must overcome the flesh or the flesh will overcome and destroy the inner life.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#12. No vital Christianity is possible unless at least three aspects of it are developed. These are the inner life of devotion, the outer life of service, and the intellectual life of rationality.
D. Elton Trueblood
#13. Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
Jane Kenyon
#14. Four major existential concerns - death, meaning in life, isolation, and freedom - play a crucial role in the inner life of every human being and
Irvin D. Yalom
#15. The creative person finds himself in a state of turmoil, restlessness, emptiness, and unbearable frustration unless he expresses his inner life in some creative way.
Silvano Arieti
#16. There are certain people that you don't have to even work at extracting their inner life. It is just there and they're happy to share it with you.
Carol Friedman
#17. The role of humankind is to use the cultural and social environment it has created to devise new global values ... Human relations with nature are intimately bound up in interpersonal relations and with the relation of the self and its inner life.
Daisaku Ikeda
#18. It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected. That
Sabahattin Ali
#19. It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#20. After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.
Evelyn Underhill
#21. Today, I take the time to get my friends and acquaintances current on the shifts in my inner life. I communicate clearly and openly. I allow time for people to adjust to the ways in which I have changed. I, too, adjust to the change in others.
Julia Cameron
#22. The Spirit has his own existence and personal function in the inner life of God and the economy of salvation: his task is to bring about the unity of the human race in the Body of Christ, but he also imparts to this unity a personal, and hence diversified, character.
John Meyendorff
#23. Dreams give information about the secrets of the inner life and reveal to the dreamer hidden factors of his personality. As long as these are undiscovered, they
C. G. Jung
#24. No, I was crying because I was suddenly flooded with an understanding of how little I really knew: about her pains, her secrets, the fantasies that played in her head when she lay in bed at night. Her inner life.
Lena Dunham
#25. What we consider real is also imagined; every life lived is also an inner life, a life created.
Margaret Atwood
#26. Approach your own inner life with a loving quality that accepts who you are without trying to change who you are.
Laozi
#27. Self-confidence comes naturally when your inner life and your outer life are in harmony.
Brian Tracy
#29. Washington possessed the superb self-confidence that comes only to those men whose inner life is faint.
William E. Woodward
#30. I think for everyone it's good to have your own personal work on a character and a film before you even start rehearsing, to have an inner life.
Kirsten Dunst
#31. The Bhagavad-Gita changes this. It takes the Warrior Ethos and elevates it to a loftier and nobler plane - the plane of the individual's inner life, to his struggle to align himself with his own higher nature.
Steven Pressfield
#32. The natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights ... Everything is a gestation and then bringing forth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#33. Growing and opening the inner life in order for us to more fully take in the world is an essential part of coming to our senses.
Tobin Hart
#34. Do you realize you can actually listen a person's soul into existence? Your fervent interest in the inner life of those you care for can awaken their dormant powers. The teacher Richard Moss says 'The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention.' Offer this gift.
Rob Brezsny
#35. There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
E. M. Forster
#36. Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.
Cesare Pavese
#37. I'm trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn't write if I didn't need to be making those discoveries, if I didn't feel the perpetual ignorance of being a human being.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#38. I made a decision that to me, photography had to be something that I could feel. I could feel in my stomach. I could not take pictures that were not connected to my own inner life.
Jacob Aue Sobol
#39. They were too hopelessly alienated in their inner life ever to have that contest which is an effort towards agreement.
George Eliot
#40. We must have a strong inner life of fellowship and intimacy with Jesus if we are going to have a strong outer life of ministry
Timothy Keller
#41. If your inner life is not producing what you would like on the outside, don't be discouraged ... just be willing to change.
Joyce Meyer
#42. Loyalty is not a passive, negative guardianship of the gate-- loyalty arises from the complete & utter opening & subsequent blazing forth of one's inner life. It is an active, determined desire that demands total self-awareness & deliberate engagement.
Qiu Miaojin
#43. Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
Kenneth Clark
#44. What if we were to take seriously the possibility that our students have a rich and authoritative inner life and tried to nourish it rather than negate it?
Mary Rose O'Reilley
#45. Mother was a beautiful young woman; the house was too plain, too small to contain her. I watched her; for the first time I understood that she had an inner life that didn't have anything to do with me or my brothers and sisters.
Ayana Mathis
#46. If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.
Charlotte Rampling
#47. To live fully, outwardly and inwardly, not to ignore the external reality for the sake of the inner life, or the reverse, that's quite a task
Etty Hillesum
#48. For me there's several components to picture-taking and it starts with my goals as an artist. It's capturing I guess the inner life of my subject and then it is giving them their idealized version of themselves.
Carol Friedman
#49. If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process.
Sam Harris
#50. One of the great problems facing men is their failure to realize the fact that a child possesses an active psychic life even when he cannot manifest it, and that the child must secretly perfect this inner life over a long period of time.
Maria Montessori
#51. Characterization requires a constant back-and-forth between the exterior events of the story and the inner life of the character.
David Corbett
#52. I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#53. A murder is a challenge, an embarrassment, to the inner life of the dead one, almost a dishonor, like other violent events that may come upon you without warning. It is not certain that you may not have in some careless or driven way chosen to put yourself in the path of a murderer.
Elizabeth Hardwick
#54. A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.
Wassily Kandinsky
#55. Therefore, the person living the inner life never condemns and does not criticize the objects of another, however small or ridiculous they may appear, for he knows that every object in the life of a person is but a stepping stone which leads him forward if he only wishes to go forward.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#56. The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
Seamus Heaney
#57. Only when your inner life is right will your outer life be right as well.
Jim George
#58. Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
Hilary Mantel
#59. Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.
Franz Marc
#60. The home is the center of your soul; it's a total reflection of your inner life. If you have a dreary home, it means you are dark inside.
Alexandra Stoddard
#61. Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
W. H. Auden
#62. Our parents are always an important part of our inner life.
Eraldo Banovac
#63. And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.
Ray Stannard Baker
#64. The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#65. Yielding your inner life to God will empower you to live the kind of outer life that honors the Lord and blesses others.
Jim George
#66. It's the inner life that fucks up relationships.
Glen Duncan
#67. The tiniest mite has an inner life of which we can know nothing.
Marty Rubin
#68. Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.
Joyce Carol Oates
#69. Whatever results you're getting, be they rich or poor, good or bad, positive or negative, always remember that your outer world is simply a reflection of your inner world. If things aren't going well in your outer life, it's because things aren't going well in your inner life. It's that simple.
T. Harv Eker
#70. Science has destroyed even the refuge of the inner life. What was once a sheltering haven has become a place of terror
Carl Jung
#71. Experiences, much more than instruction, are a seeing with the inner eye - finding a channel to our essential inner life, a door to our deepest understanding wherein we have the capacity for universal response.
Lawren Harris
#72. Flow is the process of achieving happiness through control over one's inner life. The optimal state of inner experience is order in consciousness. This happens when we focus our attention (psychic energy) on realistic goals and when our skills match the challenges we face.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#73. Now, stopping thought is only the beginning. As Brahmananda, who was a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, once remarked: The inner life begins with samadhi. This is an awesome thought, I realize, for the average person who meditates, that it could begin with samadhi.
Frederick Lenz
#74. It was such a relief to realize someone else had a weird vivid inner life like my own!
Jacqueline Wilson
#75. Your horrific time of trouble offered you truths about yourself, windows into your own soul, and maps to the terrain of your inner life. Wise people learn to gather this intelligence to help them conquer themselves and then to live in loftier ways.
Stephen Mansfield
#76. The man who can articulate the movements of his inner life need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.
Henri Nouwen
#77. When I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life?
Janet Frame
#78. I pray that I may strengthen my inner life, so that I may find serenity. I pray that my soul may be restored in quietness and peace.
Anonymous
#79. Nothing reveals more about the inner life of a people than their arts ...
Diane Ackerman
#80. Materialism leads us to lose awareness of our inner life, which is bad enough; but to be hypnotized by our own feelings and sensations and forget about others and the world around us is worse.
Anonymous
#81. On the whole I consider the constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding.
Robert Walser
#82. This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past.
Viktor E. Frankl
#83. No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life - the furniture inside his skull.
A.S. Byatt
#84. The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#85. The inner life of the [imagination], and not the personal and tiny experiential resources of the actor, should be elaborated on the stage and shown to the audience. This life is rich and revealing for the audience as well as for the actor himself.
Michael Chekhov
#86. If we grow wiser and more learned in our intercourse with wise and learned persons, how much more will we gain in our inner life by communing with God in prayer.
Huldrych Zwingli
#87. It is difficult to adjust our outer and inner life with perfect honesty to all!
Thomas Hardy
#88. A small amount of good literature can often teach more about the inner life than volumes of psychology.
Thomas Moore
#89. The insecure people enjoy bad mouthing the others. They indulge in the continuous havoc and they tangle themselves in this spider web of plots and conflicts. I really wonder what it is about their inner life that make them so insecure. #Justmyobservation.
Euginia Herlihy
#90. Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes.
Thomas Merton
#91. Each young person is a poet of sorts, trying to sort out the poetics of their inner life and its relation to the great world around it. Each elder is a philosopher of sorts, trying to sort out the meanings and gleanings of a life as well as the necessary implications of the presence of death.
Michael Meade
#92. I wanted to live the inner life of every man I saw, look at the world through his eyes.
Aleksandr Kuprin
#93. Is a stranger in a crowd less than human, just because you can't witness her inner life?
Greg Egan
#94. The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.
Parker J. Palmer
#95. You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
Mike Nichols
#96. Most true happiness comes from one's inner life, from the disposition of the mind and soul. Admittedly, a good inner life is difficult to achieve, especially in these trying times. It takes reflection and contemplation and self-discipline.
William L. Shirer
#97. I had a very active inner life as a kid. There's a good album or two worth of stuff that I can bring out on a rainy day if I have a loss for inspiration or whatever - even now.
Ariel Pink
#98. Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
Edward Hopper
#99. The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life.
Leopold Sedar Senghor
#100. 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.
William James
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