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Reflection Quotes
"It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person's mind, that mind's connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed."
32
"And, lying on my bed in some biscuit-colored hotel room in Nice, with a balcony facing the Promenade des Anglais, I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel even how my sadness can make me happy . . ."
32
"If you knew what I would become in the future, would you have treated me the same way today?."
32
"Looking back really does make you wonder, but the truth is it doesn't change a thing."
32
"Day by day we increase in age. Step by step we reduce the number of our steps. When you grow old, you shall see life differently and you shall get a better understanding of the journey of life: how you lived it and how you should have lived it!"
32
"I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?"
32
"In a sense, there's a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader."
31
"Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need."
31
"He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing."
31
"Reflection is a good thing. It allows us to look back in time so we can connect the dots between specific memories to reveal the purpose and meaning behind synchronistic events."
31
"The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin's rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you wake another day and notice, like any curious naturalist, the boys."
31
"Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it."
31
"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."
31
"A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another."
31
"I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book."
31
"Have you noticed,' she asked him, 'how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?"
31
"To reject the word is to reject the human search."
30
"Every person has his secret; in reverie, unbeknown to others, he finds peace, freedom, sorrow and love."
30
"Some experiences are so wonderful, we are like those who dreamed experiencing it. Yet some are beyond amazing when compared to our best experiences we are as though we had been sleeping all the while."
30
"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?"
30
"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."
30
"Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then-fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work- What are these Martians? What are we? I answered, clearing my throat."
30
"I remember things like dates down to minutes, what they smelled like, how they walked and how they tug their hands in their pockets. I twine myself in nostalgia of moments and not necessarily the people in them. I long for the idea of the past and occasionally forget the present. I find myself lost in memories, just looking to recreate the moment; forgetting the past is in the past and what we have is now."
30
"The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified."
30
"The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched."
30
"Believe me, Michael:Those who flee from the past will always lose the race.I know this from experience. When you reach your goal,Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you."
30
"I don't have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb."
30
"There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness; nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness-(if only so that possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we have it; for sad as it is, no human body can be happily drunk all the time)."
30
"Worshipping the Lord means giving Him the place that he must have; worshipping the Lord means stating, believing - not only by our words - that He alone truly guides our lives; worshipping the Lord means that we are convinced before Him that He is the only God, the God of our lives, the God of our history."
29
"I always wondered what hearing one's own obituary might sound like, and I sort of feel like I may have just heard part of it at least."
29
"I think sometimes, being silent and watching, can change a person."
29
"The longer you live, the more mistakes you make. And the more sorrows you carry."
29
"The Constitution is a document that should only be amended with great caution."
29
"Night is when the whispers of the past become the echoes of the present."
29
"In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known."
29
"No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone."
29
"Your glass will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own minds."
29
"But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer."
29
"The man of pleasure by a vain attempt to be more happy than any man can be is often more miserable than most men."
29
"And the memory made her humble, for we should not forget what it is to be young and to have ideas and attitudes that may later seem so fanciful."
29
"Pause, ponder,consult, think through it well, understand the consequence, know the benefit and take a second look at it again for it takes a little mistake to cause a big had I know with a deep regret."
29
"Have you made a choice in your past which was right at the time, but once you had a chance to think about it, you wished you could reverse your decision or amend it? Rethinking gives you permission to use your thoughts to change your mind. Take what is and spin it around to give you a new review and fresh perspective."
29
"When fortune favors fools, it is to punish them for the sake of the wise."
28
"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."
28
"She'd known me my whole life. It's hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing a part of yourself."
28
"And then, looking back at my first Olympics, and when the pressure was on, in '94 and '98, and looking back and going, wow. I sensed and felt what Brian had gone through."
28
"You NEED to look back to remember the awesome memories, to remember the positive lessons you have learned, to help someone else learn from what you have lived and to see how far you have come."
28
"She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them."
28
"Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears."
28
"There are three people one can never reason with: a drunk, a crazy person, and a fool."
28
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