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Reflection Quotes
"I learn my world through writing."
19
"I am a buyer of blank books. Kids find it interesting that I would buy a blank book. They say, "Twenty-Six dollars for a blank book! Why would you pay that?" The reason I pay twenty-six dollars is to challenge myself to find something worth twenty-six dollars to put in there. All my journals are private, but if you ever got hold of one of them, you wouldn't have to look very far to discover it is worth more than twenty-six dollars"
19
"Look back on your life and find something small that made a big difference."
19
"How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?"
19
"I think that tennis is a lady's sport, so we should look out there like ladies."
19
"Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago."
19
"You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid-and I know they are-yet I won't be wiser?"
19
"Where do we begin this process of reevaluation of values? It makes sense to begin with our mind, which is the tool we use to evaluate. Once we make sure it is functioning as it should, we can feel confident in using it to think about our beliefs and priorities."
19
"I've never looked forward before. I've always looked back. I think about the past way too much and I think about what I should have done and everything I did wrong and I've never once looked forward in my life."
19
"I was lost yesterday, I am found today and I will be forgotten tomorrow."
19
"It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit."
18
"Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one."
18
"Instead of a book, what if we're actually writing (or not writing) in the margins of our lives? What if our lives are books? What is the sign of our presence? Are we pressing into the margins our interpretations and questions? Are we circling offending verbs and drawing furious arrows to the margin where we scrawl "irony," "frustration," "voiceless," "unfair!" Or do we simply turn the pages, passively receiving what's given, furiously disagreeing but remaining silent about it?"
18
"Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself. The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself."
18
"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."
18
"Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly."
18
"I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude - a feeling which increases with the years."
18
"When all you wanted was to be wanted, you wish you could go back and tell yourself what you know now."
18
"When writing a comprehensive self-investigatory scroll, the writer attempts to weave a network of strands capable of enmeshing all sizes of ideas including those with no obvious interconnection. The writer must also trace all lingering thoughts to their original source in personal experiences, and revaluate each exquisite nuance notched into a person's conscious mind including acts of depravity, violence, and the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace."
18
"He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire."
18
"Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them."
17
"I think it's really important for me not to forget where I came from."
17
"If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right."
17
"To some extent, it is almost blasphemous to think that insult, anger and irritation could be a positive force."
17
"He's right. I can't deny it. I am the reason Day lost everything that matters to him."
17
"She came out of her reverie with a deep sigh and looked at him with a dreamy gaze of a soul that had been wandering afar, star-led."
17
"Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me'. Then he wonders why he's unhappy."
17
"We need to do a lot more thinking about how the regime is going to evolve, how the bad guys are going to adapt their tactics, and what measures we're going to need in order to go forward."
17
"In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone."
16
"Well, first of all, going off with dianetics was based upon a thought of mine."
16
"Everything you have said will not matter anymore one day, only those things that you never said will always haunt you and strangle you every time you see your world in someone else's hand."
16
"Today is a brand new beginning for me!"
16
"Ah, they said. Qué bueno. And for a long time afterward, he would have reason to recall those smiles and reflect upon the goodwill that inspired them — for it had the power to protect, to confer honor, and to strengthen resolve. It had the power to hear men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted."
16
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."
16
"I think this was a nice idea we had in this country and a nice landscape to experiment with. But I think there comes a time in almost any experimentation or idea, where you have to evaluate it, maybe our time has come. In the context of the real world, not just the American world but all around, we haven't done too well. We are not a very good advertisement for the idea we represented. If you lose one wheel of the car, you might be able to get to the side of the road, and some freaks can make it on two, but if you lose three, man, you're in serious trouble. I think we've lost three."
16
"We dig holes for ourselves, of comfortable living, and it's hard to see just how deep down you are until you suddenly want to take a look at the world up there, some fresh airand realise you can't get up. You're too far down."
16
"Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But it is not the same with words. What you do not say can haunt you."
16
"To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are."
16
"It is not the mountain that is our problem but the absence of knowledge on how to deal withthe mountain."
16
"You must purge yourself before finding faults in others.When you see a mistake in somebody else, try to find if you are making the same mistake.This is the way to take judgment and to turn it into improvement.Do not look at others' bodies with envy or with superiority.All people are born with different constitutions.Never compare with others.Each one's capacities are a function of his or her internal strength.Know your capacities and continually improve upon them."
15
"The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life."
15
"It made a big difference in my life to grow up with a dad who wasn't afraid of how great my mom was."
15
"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."
15
"When fortune favors fools, it is to punish them for the sake of the wise."
15
"I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you're trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you're giving it away."
15
"In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold."
15
"I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first."
15
"He lived in London indeed but invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch."
15
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