reflection quotes

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

I’m constantly thinking.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

I need one of those baby monitors from my subconscious to my consciousness so I can know what the hell I’m really thinking about.

Last year we said, ‚Things can’t go on like this‘, and they didn’t, they got worse.

I wish I had known when I was in the White House what I know now about the Third World.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

I made my fair share of mistakes.

What we live by we die by.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

I’m not the same man I used to be, I’m not out hell-raising, stuff like that. I am a changed man.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

My mum passing away wasn’t funny, but that funeral and what I went through, the things that happened, looking back at it, there were funny moments. You have to be strong enough to look back at it, to sit and assess the situation.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.