Quotes About Reflection

We are silent after hearing the Word because the Word is still speaking and dwelling within us. We are silent at the beginning of the day because God should have the first word, and we are silent before going to sleep because the last word also belongs to God." —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together 6

remember these practices earn us nothing in the economy of God. Nothing. Their only purpose is to place us before God. That is all.

Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification. One

Bonhoeffer writes, "Real silence, real stillness, really holding one's tongue comes only as the sober consequence of spiritual stillness."6

The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.

If you are too busy to read, you are too busy.

Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification.

Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important

The memory of things become the reality of things. Or maybe the past is not permanent. Maybe the tree has said its fill, and leaves us with an image of ourselves.

The heart sags. My footprints forget me. I don't think anything will ever be the same. This is the edge of the cliff and you can't move, can't jump. Everything is vertical. With binoculars you can see where you'll be in an hour. Raindrops collect on the lens. A fine mist. It hides us. It drifts into clocks. Gravity presses your hands. Some hurts never get said. Some get smuggled.

The thing is to sift out the important sounds, little syllables and vowels that bring hints of their lost words, and not to mistake the fossil for the life, or the kiss for the love, not to mistake the fragment for the sentence.

We come from a place that has always been inside us. Our words migrate helplessly. The world reflects only itself. Which is why we have to create our own memories.

stars that turn slowly off each dawn so that we begin to see how many things can go on living without us, — Richard Jackson, from "Triptych," Broken Horizons: Poems (Press 53, 2018)

I would like to find the words to make sure the man only looks longingly at the way night has begun to deepen itself in the river. It's easy to drown yourself in words that drift out of your past. — Richard Jackson, from "Easy," Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)

Sometimes I think the soul is a shadow even gravity can't touch, and love is what passes in the mirror as we look away. from "Desperate Note from Byron's Palace in Lerici

Maybe I should just lie quietly inside you while our old selves slip in and out of the back rooms of the soul.

Now the wind is lifting the eyelid of the lake. I remember my soul breaks open like a seed beneath the ground just to think of you.

That was when our love began for me, though late, the way a flock of darkness settles over your shoulders. I remember the muted reflections that smudged the water prowling among the lingering rocks, a snail crawling out of its shell, the drizzle of light, the blackened windows. It was when that the sun peeled away the dark from the air, the surface of the water, then the soul. —Richard Jackson, from "Place Message Here," The Cortland Review . Spring 2005.

When do you realize the selves you left behind have gone on without you, living the many lives you now begin to resemble?

The lost leaves measure our years; they are gone as the days are gone.

The great sea makes one a great sceptic.

The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.

Let not the eyes grow dim, look not back but forward; the soul must uphold itself like the sun. Let us labour to make the heart grow larger as we become older, as the spreading oak gives more shelter. That we could but take to the soul some of the greatness and the beauty of the summer!

The way I see it, anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet.