Quotes About Reflection

As Jack listened at the top of the stairs, a tear welled in his eye, and rolled very slowly down his cheek. 8

We enjoy warmth because we have been cold. We appreciate light because we have been in darkness. By the same token, we can experience joy because we have known sadness.

Yet i say to you, do not rush to marriage for it is a deep and perfect thing. Test first, that you may be certain you are called to it by love, and not simply by pleasures of the flesh which will consume themselves and leave only ashes and misery

God's people have no assurances that the dark experiences of life will be held at bay, much less that God will provide some sort of running commentary on the meaning of each day's allotment of confusion, boredom, pain, or achievement.

Chesterton,' he said gently, 'this is the hardest part of all for you. I know exactly what you're going through and it's no triumph for me to be right. I have transported us all away from your world and your Universe and we have landed on a new planet. Accept that because you must. Tears and anger will not take you back to Earth, so learn from this new experience and profit by it.

Beauty is the harvest of presence.

Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

In the silence that follows a great line you can feel Lazarus deep inside even the laziest, most deathly afraid part of you, lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

Feeling far away from what we want tells us one of two things about our work: that we are at the beginning or that we have forgotten where we were going.

The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of our self, a surer sense of the world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that make us retreat from further participation.

We might at first label the body's simple need to focus inward depression. But as we practice going inward, we come to realize that much of it is not depression in the least; it is a cry for something else, often the physical body's simple need for rest, for contemplation, and for a kind of forgotten courage, one difficult to hear, demanding not a raise, but another life.

The great measure of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through.

Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath, this sitting here. This opening to life we have refused again and again until now. Until now.

We have patience for everything but what is most important to us. We look at the life of our own most central imaginings and see it beckon. For the most part, we have not the courage to follow it, but we do not have the courage to leave it. We turn our face for a moment and tell ourselves we will be sure to get back to it. When we look again, ten years have passed and we wonder what in God's name happened to us.

Walking the roads is enough today, I'll follow the dark line of receding sun

Work, like marriage, is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself. It is a place full of powerful undercurrents, a place to find our selves, but also, a place to drown, losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation.

Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

Work among all its abstracts, is actually intimacy, the place where the self meets the world.

Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief, turning down through its black water to the place we cannot breathe, will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering, the small round coins, thrown by those who wished for something else.

To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

beginning well means seating ourselves in the body again, catching up with ourselves and the person we have become since we last tried to begin.

In the contemplative Christian tradition, to be humiliated is to be returned to the ground of your being.

You have a moment in the day, as Blake said, that Satan (the strategic mind, worried about being 'productive') cannot find.