top of page
.png){kind=small}
"You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?"
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Reflection quotes
"When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?"
"The laws is not meant to destroy us. But our disobedience leads to our own destruction."
"Whether you are aware of it or not, your life is still disappearing. It's pouring out, it keeps diminishing."
"You never know what people have endured to get where they are."
"Why do you compare yourself to others? Can you carry weight of others on your shoulders?"
"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."
"Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study."
"What you are seeking is yourself."
"Life is head and shoulders above all other things we regard as precious in this world."
"The world is full of vanities."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."
"How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop."
"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
"Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior."
"Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."
"Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure."
"Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?"
bottom of page