Some authours and books offer deep introspection of human lives, that you learn and realise things about yourself from reading them:

I got that feeling from reading Montaigne's Essays.

Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton and Samuel Johnson's essays also are effective in a similar vein.

Plutarch's Parallel Live's is the essential book on politics, after reading it, when you read the newspapers you get a feeling that there is nothing new under the Sun, in politics.