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Reflection Quotes
"Waking up in a room with no natural light does something to a man. no windows. I'm almost afraid to die. I fear my soul won't make it out."
15
"The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them."
15
"Every man carries his own past with him," Hayt said."
15
"When I think over what I have said I envy dumb people."
15
"I had begun to feel that life was a repetition of the same thing; that there was nothing new either in me or in him; and that, on the contrary, we kept going back as it were on what was old."
15
"There is a moment when time stops, when the air grows still, when you enter a state of nothingness, a state of purity and perfection. That is the moment to strive for."
15
"A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right."
15
"He accepted the deformity which had made life so hard for him; he knew that it had warped his character, but no he saw also that by reason of it he had acquired that power of introspection which had given him so much delight. Without it he would never have had his keen appreciation of beauty, his passion for art and literature, and his interest in the varied spectacle of life. Then he saw that normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect of body or of mind. The only reasonable thing was to accept the good of men and be patient with their faults."
15
"I don't want my life to be defined by what is etched on a tombstone. I want it to be defined by what is etched in the lives and hearts of those I've touched."
15
"The way for a young man to rise is to improve himself in every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him."
15
"Often, when I want to consult my impulses, I cannot find them."
15
"She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters - the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go."
15
"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else."
15
"The beginning of a new millennium is to consider and reorganize our life."
15
"My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots."
15
"The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."
15
"Always account for each unit of passing time."
15
"Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun."
15
"From under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go."
15
"Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up."
15
"She must have been debating staying in the line or forcing me to run home and change."
14
"If you give into your emotional illusions, and you will find yourself lost in a maze with no exits, nor entrances, but winding paths that lead you in circles so many times that you grow familiar and comfortable with the very place you shouldn't be in."
14
"She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time, but alas! Alas! She must confess to herself that she was not wise yet."
14
"I do not know where the error lies. I do not pretend to set people right, but I do see they are often wrong."
14
"Lull me to sleep, ye winds, whose fitful soundSeems from some faint Aeolian harp-string caught;Seal up the hundred wakeful eyes of thoughtAs Hermes with his lyre in sleep profoundThe hundred wakeful eyes of Argus bound;For I am weary, and am overwroughtWith too much toil, with too much care distraught,And with the iron crown of anguish crowned.Lay thy soft hand upon my brow and cheek,O peaceful Sleep! until from pain releasedI breathe again uninterrupted breath!Ah, with what subtile meaning did the GreekCall thee the lesser mystery at the feastWhereof the greater mystery is death!"
14
"Life demands death. Life demands death to ego - A state when we only think and care about ourselves."
14
"Had it not been for "Nightline," Morrie would have died without ever seeing me again. I had no good excuse for this, except the one that everyone these days seems to have. I had become too wrapped up in the siren song of my life. I was busy."
14
"The other night I was lying in bed, looking up at the stars, and I wondered, 'Where the hell is my roof?"
14
"On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream."
14
"At last she sighed."But the most wretched thing - is it not? - is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice."
14
"Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand."
14
"Jiu Jitsu is meant to serve us, not the other way around. It is meant to make you more of whatever it is you already are. It is meant to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is meant to bring to conscious attention all that once went unseen. It is meant to make you more loving. It is meant to make you more wise, but less certain. It is meant to make us humble, yet supremely confident. It is meant to remind us of our frailty while simultaneously making us feel invincible."
14
"It is never a river's fault that one cannot swim."
14
"Whoever doubt, hardens his own heart."
14
"This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone."
14
"And it is strange that absence can feel like presence."
14
"Most people like mirrors; what they do not like, is people, who are mirrors."
14
"Within he felt that faint stirring of derision for the whole business of life which is the salt of the American mentality. Outwardly they are sentimental and enthusiastic and inwardly they are profoundly cynical."
14
"If I knew then what I know now I guess it'd make no difference, Fate's sure in the way somehow. What's important is the essence. Although we still have free will We also have a whole lot to deal."
14
"In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets."
14
"She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed and made everything bend to it."
14
"For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself."
14
"Your sorrow will become smaller, like a star in the daylight that you can't even see. It's there, shining, but there is also a vast expanse of blue sky."
14
"What would you do if you only had one day left in this world? Spend it with the people you love? Travel to the far corners of the earth to see as many wonders as possible? Eat nothing but chocolate? Would you apologize for all your mistakes? Would you stand up to those you'd never had the courage to face? Would you tell your secret crush that you loved him or her? Why is it that we wait till the last minute to do the things we should be doing all along?"
14
"How did you become blind, uh, Jeff is it?"Yeah, Jeff. Well, I looked directly at the sun, you know, the way they always tell you not to. If only I had listened."
14
"A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?"
14
"We look back to times past, and we mass them together, and say in such a year such and such events took place, such wars occupied that year, and during the next there was peace. Yet each year was then divided into weeks, days, minute, and slow-moving seconds, during which there were human minds to note and distinguish them, as now."
14
"We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as 'ordinary blessings."
14
"From Jeff Greenfield: 'I once asked Elie Wiesel 'Are you an optimist or a pessimist?' 'An optimist,' he said. 'I have to be."
14
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