Helpful comments and links on the subject can be found in Justin Taylor's blog post, "Inspect but Don't Introspect."
Brief notations I've made in the past:
- C.S. Lewis - "The attempt to discover by introspective analysis our own spiritual condition is to me a horrible thing which reveals, at best, not the secrets of God's spirit and ours, but their transpositions in intellect, emotion, and imagination, and which at worst may be the quickest road to presumption or despair." Transposition, p. 66 (Macmillan edition)- See Leanne Payne, ch.12 "Introspection versus The Imagination" of The Healing Pressnce- Leanne Payne in Real Presence, ch. 11 says "We may, in a manner, become incarnate of the Object; for as we look to the Object, loving it, we participate in its being." . . . "Only in loving that which is outside ourselves can we ourselves be whole and free to create. p. 151
- James Houston wrote, "The real meaning of enjoyment is... the act of going outside one's self, as a small child does, to be involved with other objects for their own sake. It is therefore the antithesis of introspection, of being imprisoned within one's self. Such joy is a desire, yet it is not trapped in self-seeking. It is a response, even an intellectual response, such as a mathematician may have to the beauty of numbers, yet it is not self-congratulatory. It is love, but not self-love, rather it is love of everything for its own sake. Joy is akin to humility, to unconscious self-forgetfulness and to kindness in respecting the uniqueness of the other." - I Believe in the Creator, p. 205