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Reflection Quotes
"So many people are able to do something in life, but when they compare what they have done to their larger environment, they feel they have not done anything!"
16
"One sees great things from the valley only small things from the peak."
16
"Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul."
16
"And we all end up where we started."
16
"Life stand still here."
16
"There is a danger there - a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?"
16
"Know thy own point: this kind, this due degreeOf blindness, weakness, Heav'n bestows on thee."
16
"Anna Petrovna: I am beginning to think, doctor, that fate has cheated me. The majority of people, who maybe are no better than I am, are happy and pay nothing for that happiness. I have paid for everything, absolutely everything! And how dearly! Why have I paid such terrible interest?"
16
"I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made.."
16
"That night was a dark day. Of course, all nights are dark days, because night is simply a badly lit version of day, ..."
16
"Never wish for someone else's life because you never know if they also wish yours was theirs."
16
"I admit to being prone to deep thinking, which " given that I'm emerging from dark times " can take me to some very sombre or profound places. But this is no bad thing. I always resurface wiser and with a way of viewing things that is different to before."
16
"Relationship Time to Aloneness." Having a companion fixes you in time and that of the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present."
16
"What rubs off on me is hard to rub off. So, I'd better figure out what I rubbing up against."
16
"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made."
16
"If a fly lands on your food, do not use a hammer to remove it."
16
"Those who envy you inadvertently admit to being inferior to you."
16
"Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic."
15
"A life spent at the edge of the pier is a life full of regret, a life full of fear."
15
"Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions."
15
"To doubt is to deny yourself of your own existence."
15
"Perhaps they are singing songs to you,' he said, 'and I just think they're asking me questions.' He paused again. Sometimes he would pause for days, just to see what it was like."
15
"What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves - our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies."
15
"Sometimes love can be both the punishment and the crime."
15
"Pondering over your actions is a practical way of helping yourself in the battle against sin."
15
"Supposing there is no life everlasting. Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes."Waddington reflected for a little while. "I wonder if it matters what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books the write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."
15
"The mistakes of the past are valuable lessons for the future."
15
"It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence."
15
"If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?"
15
"He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death."
15
"If a man should ascend alone into heaven and behold clearly the structure of the universe and the beauty of the stars, there would be no pleasure for him in the awe-inspiring sight, which would have filled him with delight if he had had someone to whom he could describe what he had seen. Nature abhors solitude."
15
"It seems that one ought to read in two ways: 1) because of a particular and personal interest, which makes the thing one's own, regardless of what other people think of the book 2) to a certain extent, because it is something one 'ought to have read' but one must be quite clear this why one is reading."
15
"I have finally come to realize that it's being forced to be honest with myself that's made my pain painful all along."
15
"Most people's greatest regret is not living the life they knew they could live."
15
"[There's a] point where you have to leave the dough alone. It's silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself."
15
"Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I've no regrets."
15
"And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?"
15
"I saw this was the way of the future, to leave the past behind as if it were a dream."
15
"Do you know why hurricanes have names instead of numbers? To keep the killing personal. No one cares about a bunch of people killed by a number. '200 Dead as Number Three Slams Ashore' is not nearly as interesting a headline as 'Charlie kills 200.' Death is much more satisfying and entertaining if you personalize it.Me, I'm still waitin' for Hurricane Ed. Old Ed wouldn't hurt ya, would he? Sounds kinda friendly. 'Hell no, we ain't evacuatin'. Ed's comin'!"
15
"Don't sacrifice the present and attempt to achieve the impossible- to completely correct the past... It's gone! Learn from it and move on..."
15
"And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it."
15
"Memory is the enemy of wonder."
15
"Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling."
15
"Where were you when I undressed and told the tales of my day?Where were youwhenI was silent with God in prandial pray?Where were youwhen I recited love poems as I lay?Where were you?"
15
"I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to."
15
"A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?"
15
"Envy, as distasteful as it is, has seeped into my mind on rare occasions, and those I've envied, although few in number, have only been those that live a life of leisure with peace of mind and time to do such wonderful things as read."
15
"The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame."
15
"If God wanted the woods to be quiet, He would not have given birds songs to sing."
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