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Reflection Quotes
"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."
41
"Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects."
41
"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."
41
"He had the blue kite in his hands, that was the first thing I saw. And I can't lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips."
41
"It's so hard to find the place somewhere in the middle of the best and worst I've felt."
41
"If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door."
41
"The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity."
41
"How tragic it is to find that an entire lifetime is wasted in pursuit of distractions while purpose is neglected."
41
"Look back on your life and find something small that made a big difference."
41
"Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody."
41
"Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought."
41
"Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history."
41
"The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows."
41
"Deliberately and purposefully schedule meetings with yourself. These are the most important meetings in the life of one who intends to make their success deliberate. During these meeting you do much of the quality and honest communication with yourself. This is besides the conversations you are always carrying on with yourself in your own head or audibly. That doesn't mean you are crazy, we all do it and we just need to improve the quality and positivity of those conversations."
41
"And I dreamed of a home long ago in New England, my little kitkats trying to go a thousand miles following me on the road across America, and my mother with a pack on her back, and my father running after the ephemeral uncatchable train, and I dreamed and woke up to a gray dawn, saw it, sniffed (because I had seen all the horizon shift as if a sceneshifter had hurried to put it back in place and make me believe in its reality), and went back to sleep, turning over. "It's all the same thing," I heard my voice say in the void that's highly embraceable during sleep."
41
"One will never find in the waterfall of sights anything else than the Illusion of Life, which falls in torrents on the granite rocks of the souls."
41
"I didn't let what I wanted to do become a made up memory that I looked back on years down the road and wished it was real."
41
"If my life were a fragrance, it would smell like the sea."
41
"How odd that we spend so much time treating the darkness, and so little time seeking the light. The ego loves to glorify itself by self-analysis, yet we do not get rid of darkness by hitting it with a baseball bat. We only get rid of darkness by turning on the light."
41
"It is not the mountain that is our problem but the absence of knowledge on how to deal withthe mountain."
41
"I think it's really important for me not to forget where I came from."
40
"It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit."
40
"The year 1826 was remarkable for the commencement of one of those fearful droughts to which we have reason to believe the climate of New South Wales is periodically subject."
40
"I have always made an effort to render every detail of my reality with the greatest accuracy; but I have never paid attention to whether my presentation of historical facts was an exact one."
40
"It was better to know the worst than to wonder."
40
"Why is it,' she asked, snuggling closer, 'that I so often imagine myself running away and running free?"
40
"Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death."
40
"There comes a time in one's life, perhaps in middle age, when we stop and assess who we are, and the life we have."
40
"Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes."
40
"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."
40
"What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull. But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be."
40
"The best way for reflection and self-assessment is to hold meetings with yourself. I will pardon you for missing some other meetings, but you must never have an excuse for missing the board meetings you need to hold with yourself " I call these "board meetings between me, myself and I. The three of us in one place, in a no-holds-barred meeting, where life-changing resolutions are reached to craft my journey to success. As board members we give each other honest feedback."
40
"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?"
40
"Past conversations were slowly realigning in Blue's head, taking on new shades of meaning as they did."
40
"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."
40
"I was the worst kind of fool. When I look back on that August night, changed forever by all my wounds and all my suffering, that undamaged Odd Thomas seems like a different human being from me, immeasurably more confident than I am now, still able to hope, but not as wise, and I mourn for him."
40
"Some people look as if they have lost their eagerness and passion. Their aspiration seems to be exhausted and fresh inspiration has abandoned their weary mind. Life has boundlessly given them material welfare, which has fully spoiled them in the end. No energy for longing has been left, as they have reached a twilight zone. The twilight of desire. ['Twilight of desire']"
40
"Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them."
39
"When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not."
39
"Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas."
39
"To lose one's self in reverie, one must be either very happy, or very unhappy. Reverie is the child of extremes."
39
"Well, first of all, going off with dianetics was based upon a thought of mine."
39
"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."
39
"This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence."
39
"It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part."
39
"All autobiography is self-indulgent."
39
"For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote."
39
"Whether your cup is half-full or half-empty, remind yourself there are others without one."
38
"Recruiting Station was a story that came as the result of many anxious awakenings during many nights."
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