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Reflection Quotes
"Two questions I'm pondering:1. If money didn't exist, would you still chase your dreams?2. If money didn't exist, would you still keep your job?If the answer is "YES" to both, you're on track. If the answer is "NO" to either, what needs to change?"
28
"How do you regret one of the best nights of your entire life? You don't. You remember every word, every look. Even when it hurts, you still remember."
28
"He recognised that all the period of Odette's life which had elapsed before she first met him, a period of which he had never sought to form any picture in his mind, was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had consisted of so many definite, dated years, each crowded with concrete incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest her past, now colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible, an obscene form, with individual and diabolical features. And he continued to refrain from seeking a conception of it, not any longer now from laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering."
28
"It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were."
28
"But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air."
28
"Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where Iwas once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past..."
28
"As I studied the remians of book pages, scatered among the ashes, my heart sank."
28
"We might give her presents, tell some tales, but would she ever be able to really understand what the journey had been like for us?"
28
"I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me."
27
"I was with book, as a woman is with child."
27
"Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are there cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel I remember wondering to be always together yet forever apart?"
27
"It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence, my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school."
27
"An invitation to a wedding invokes more trouble than a summons to a police court."
27
"What if you spent some alone time every morning? Call it prayer. Call it planning. Call it centering. I call it a powerful way to begin the day."
27
"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift."
27
"To some extent, it is almost blasphemous to think that insult, anger and irritation could be a positive force."
27
"Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way."
26
"It made a big difference in my life to grow up with a dad who wasn't afraid of how great my mom was."
26
"I had always had a little problem looking out for myself in love. I was afraid people would leave me. So I sort of clung and did everything possible to keep someone around. I didn't have a hard talk with myself about who I was keeping around. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. I clung to people like human life preservers. I thought i'd die if someone left me. Its ironic because now I'm the one who's leaving."
26
"It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come-was anyone ever so young?"
26
"Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?"
26
"Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We're all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.''Good night,' I said, and rolled onto my side.'There is nothing perfect,' August said from the doorway. 'There is only life."
26
"People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas,at the long course of the rivers,at the vast compass of the ocean,at the circular motion of the stars,and yet they pass by themselves without wondering."
26
"I care not that this moment's lot was thin and sparsely dealt all pleasures sweet can be forgot the instant they are felt."
26
"Reflection is an all-consuming, in-depth, and serious thought process that is required in a paradigm shift."
26
"What's important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It's up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that."
26
"Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?"
26
"In November, 1964 when I was a patient at the Mayo Clinic I though seriously about killing myself."
25
"It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own."
25
"Femelu could not understand this, her mother's ability to tell herself stories about her reality that did not even resemble her reality."
25
"In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears."
25
"Alas! this is not what I thought life was.I knew that there were crimes and evil men,Misery and hate; nor did I hope to passUntouched by suffering, through the rugged glen.In mine own heart I saw as in a glassThe hearts of others ... And whenI went among my kind, with triple brassOf calm endurance my weak breast I armed,To bear scorn, fear, and hate, a woeful mass!"
25
"Silence can be lovely or disturbing, depending on the source."
25
"Kennedy had been assassinated a month or so before. So we walked to the grave of John Kennedy and ended our walking symbolically at the Arlington National Cemetery."
25
"Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you."
25
"If you could really see that tree over there," Merlin said, "you would be so astounded that you'd fall over.""Really? But why?" asked Arthur. "It's just a tree.""No," Merlin said, "It's just a tree in your mind. To another mind it is an expression of infinite spirit and beauty. In God's mind it is a dear child, sweeter than anything you can imagine."
25
"In the end, you feel that your much-vaunted, inexhaustible fantasy is growing tired, debilitated, exhausted, because you're bound to grow out of your old ideals; they're smashed to splinters and turn to dust, and if you have no other life, you have no choice but to keep rebuilding your dreams from the splinters and dust. But the heart longs for something different! And it is vain to dig in the ashes of your old fancies, trying to find even a tiny spark to fan into a new flame that will warm the chilled heart and bring back to life everything that can send the blood rushing wildly through the body, fill the eyes with tears--everything that can delude you so well!"
25
"Both the thoughts and the senses were pretty things, the ultimate meaning was hidden behind both of them... from both the secret voices of the innermost truth had to be attentively perceived."
24
"Don't dwell too much on the past. The lessons are useful for the present and a preparation for the future. Move on!"
24
"If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked."
23
"It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture of encompass. Of the people of Earth's unfortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madman could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things..."
23
"In the mirror I stand, an injured deer in headlights, or maybe high beams, judging by the way my eyes water. I measure my wrists with my fingers, and I clutch at my rib cage, fingering it languidly, tracing the rise and fall of sharp bones until my heartbeat slows, and I dream of a faraway ocean."
23
"At the heart of all anger, all grudges, and all resentment, you'll always find a fear that hopes to stay anonymous."
23
"Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks."
22
"We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor."
22
"He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom."
22
"The moment we accept our pain is the moment we release our suffering. Suffering is created when we offer life resistance, and what we resist most are the experiences that bring us pain."
22
"Life feels good if you don't know what it is."
22
"From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate."
22
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