Quotes About Reflection

Wisdom is what happens when our understanding of a thing deepens to the point that it changes our behaviour.

Too much thinking is not necessary.

The greatest obstacle to our own happiness, she tells us, is too much thinking.

renunciation is the start of our inner journey. Instead of fixating on external circumstances, we look within.

when I meet people—business leaders, entertainers, and others—they tell me that what seemed to be the worst thing that could ever happen to them turned out, with the benefit of hindsight, to be the very best.

We should be careful who we blame for our unhappiness when we ourselves have created the causes for our unhappy experiences.

When one is angry, the first person to suffer is oneself. No one who is angry has a happy, peaceful mind.

As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.

It is not morbid, not depressing to contemplate one's own death. Completely the opposite! It is only when we have faced the reality of our own death that we really know how to live.

In the stillness we discover that there are other ways of knowing things than through the intellect.

Thoughts and feelings manifest in the bodies of felines as much as in humans.

As outside, so within. Thoughts arose, quite naturally, and I treated them the same as sounds or smells. As always, they would arise, abide, and pass. If I didn't engage with them, there was nowhere for them to remain—they had no power to do so on their own.

Whatever is on our mind, we project onto the world outside us.

Casting a stone into a tranquil lake has a much greater impact than throwing the same stone into a turbulent sea. So, too, the understanding of a settled mind.

It increasingly seems that life is something that happens to you and art the opportunity to understand what's transpired. You need only to be brave.

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

The quiet this evening is unsettling. I hadn't realised how loud life was until it all stopped.

Maybe it's not that it's too quiet now, maybe it was too loud before?

As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.

Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.

Except that it was no more home, just the place where he had grown up, and that first day back, touring the once familiar places only made him realize that he had already lived close to half his life.

Wisdom ages well.

David Nadelberg