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Reflection Quotes
"People who have had little self-reflection live life in a huge reality blind-spot."
6
"He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom."
6
"Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one."
6
"We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone."
6
"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."
6
"People talk about how wonderful the world must seem to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That's clearer to me every day. Each morning I am like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes."
6
"I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."
6
"We must make time to reflect on life. Someday this life will be gone."
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"Where no hope is left is left no fear."
6
"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."
6
"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."
6
"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)."
6
"You learn more from your tears than your smiles."
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"Oh that I had the opportunity to rethink so many of my decisions, for the pitfalls into which I have so frequently fallen were often dug with the shovel of those very decisions."
5
"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."
5
"The thing is, I mean, there's times when you look at the universe and you think, "What about me? and you can just hear the universe replying, "Well, what about you?"
5
"Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
5
"If you can be very impartial in analysing your own past, then you will have a much better future!"
5
"Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep..."
5
"Where you are no is the reflection of your lifelong thoughts and actions."
5
"What matter most is to complete the journey."
5
"In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was."
5
"I have to learn to hear music, to see beauty, and to find joy in silence"
5
"Most people's greatest regret is not living the life they knew they could live."
5
"I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments."
5
"Art thou like me, child of my darkest heart? And dost thou think my untamed thoughts and speak my vast language? "Yea, we are twin brothers, O, Night; for thou revealest space and I reveal my soul."
5
"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?"
5
"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."
5
"I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual."
5
"It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone."
5
"When admiring other people's gardens, don't forget to tend to your own flowers."
5
"My bad luck got tangled up with my bad decisions, and I'm paying for it."
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"She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach."
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"The longer I do my job ... the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel."
5
"There is nothing like a train journey for reflection."
5
"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."
5
"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."
5
"When I think over what I have said I envy dumb people."
5
"Why should you care so much about what others think of you, than what you think about yourself?"
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"Life is neither a feast nor a fun. But a fast."
5
"Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water."
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"Sheep don't need the shepherd to be what they are. The shepherd needs sheep to be what he is."
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"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."
5
"Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love."
5
"Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won."
5
"I could hear the human noise as were standing still in between the spaces of silence."
5
"The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment."
5
"The unrecognized genius-that's an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well? ... That a great many men are poor fools who can't see the best-that's nothing. One can't get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don't want it?"
5
"The world is like a mirror; it reflects (shows) everything exactly the way it is. If there is a defect, it will reflect (show) that defect."
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