Quotes About Reflection

20 years from now, you'd give anything to be this exact age, exactly this healthy, in this exact moment. Take a second to enjoy it.

To be always thinking about your manners is not the way to make them good; the very perfection of manners is not to think about yourself.

To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.

History is the enemy of memory.

I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:But whether this was false or honest dreamingI beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

The soul shrinksFrom all that it is about to remember,From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,And cries,"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steamAnd clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

Step off assuredly into the blank of your own mind. Something will come to you. Although at first You nod through nothing like a fogbound prow, Gravel will breed in the margins of your gaze

But I am weary of The winter way of loving things for reasons. — Richard Wilbur, from "Winter Spring," New and Collected Poems (HBJ, 1988)

In my kind world the dead were out of range And I could not forgive the sad or strange In beast or man.

If today people sit and meditate only one or two hours, looking only at their own egos, and call this reflection, how can anything come of it?

Middle age is the time of life that a man first notices in his wife.

He is prudent who can listen in silence, who can take advice so as to gain a more precise, clear, and complete knowledge of the facts.

being conscious of the fuel-burning activities that you engage in every day is good for you.

Man can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as... from a lack of bread.

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

Ask yourself if it is not also your sin that such tragedies occur, that such Christian families are alone and not helped by you who are free.

In Solomon's Song, Jesus did not come out and say where He feeds His flock. He wants us to think for ourselves. But on the Day of Judgment, we will be reproached or approved for our decision to be among, or not among, this world's sufferers.

Are you seeking Jesus? Where have you been looking for Him? As you begin your day, think through the various places you will be and the people you will be with; and envision Jesus standing next to you in each of those places.

It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce.

my first wife passed away in the spring of—" and for a moment he is touched with terror. The spring of what? Past? Future? What is any spring but a mindless rearrangement of cells in the crust of the spinning earth as it floats in endless circuit of its sun? What is the sun itself but one of a billion insensible stars forever going nowhere into nothingness? Infinity!

that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.