reflection quotes

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

I second-guess and overthink and rethink every single thing that I do.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

At ev’ry word a reputation dies.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

Fondly we think we honor merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

Life is wasted on the living.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

He is lost who is possessed by carnal desire.

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

For time is the longest distance between two places.