Robert Henri Quotes

I have always written only for myself - to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

Spend time in your head and figure yourself out. Start taking note of all the things you do that you don't like, and then you're more conscious of it, and you learn.

You find out what you think by talking to yourself.

Half my life is an act of revision.

I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I'm not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to.

'What am I missing?' is a much more important question than 'How cool am I?'

The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

Your glass will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own minds.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

I don't want to get into autobiographies; I don't want to talk about myself.

I had to examine myself very thoroughly to find the right path personally.

We need quiet time to examine our lives openly and honestly - spending quiet time alone gives your mind an opportunity to renew itself and create order.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

I'm quite influenced in this by one of my heroes, Montaigne, who thought a man's real task was to render as honest an account of himself as he could.

I think life is self-examination. Certainly the voyage that one takes.

I think it's healthy to gain a perspective on who you are deep down, question yourself, and challenge yourself; it's important to do that.

I think you're always trying to figure yourself out and mistakes that you've made.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

The world is a reflection of who we are and if we don't like the reflection, it doesn't really help to break the mirror.