reflection quotes

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

My heart aches for America and its deceived people.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

It is true that going out on to the street implies the risk of accidents happening, as they would to any ordinary man or woman. But if the church stays wrapped up in itself, it will age. And if I had to choose between a wounded church that goes out on to the streets and a sick, withdrawn church, I would definitely choose the first one.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Life is a dead-end street.

I haven’t written my own epitaph, and I’m not sure I should. Whatever it is, I hope it will be simple, and that it will point people not to me, but to the One I served.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

Time stays, we go.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

Sometimes I just sit still and enjoy God’s presence.

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I’m in a small way quite proud of some of it – I only wish I’d done more.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

I still close my eyes and go home – I can always draw from that.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

I think 9/11 affected everybody in one way or another.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

The person who doesn’t scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.

Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast.

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.