Quotes About Reflection

We were born between Oh Yeah & Goddammit. I knew life Began where I stood in the dark, Looking out into the light, & that sometimes I could see Everything through nothing. The backyard trees breathed Like a man running from himself As my brothers backed away From the screendoor.

She lives between the Vale of Kashmir & nirvana, beneath a bipolar sky. The voice speaks of an atlas & a mask, a map of Punjab, an ugly scar from college days on her abdomen, the unsaid credo, but I still can't make the voice say, Look, I'm sorry. I've been dead for a long time.

I've been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I've lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone's nightmare?

Go & tell your drinking buddies & psychoanalyst your neighbor has risen from the ashes. I wonder if I should tell you about the love letters hidden behind the doorjamb. This house still stands among my lavender flowers. Tell your inheritors to think of me when they smile up at the sky.

When the soul looks out of its body, it should see only beauty in its path. These are the sights we must hold in mind, in order to move to a higher place.

Happy will be those who take a lesson and warning from the mistakes and misfortunes of others and seek, nevertheless, to adopt the good they offer. Wisdom, wherever he finds it, it's a believer's goal, because he is more worthy of it than anyone else.

Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.

The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious ... it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.

Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.

And what is 'sensitivity'? It means two things. Firstly, paying attention to my sensations, emotions and thoughts. Secondly, allowing these sensations, emotions and thoughts to influence me.

The first thing you need to know about yourself is that you are not a story.

It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.

We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one.

If you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, explore dead ends, make space for doubts and boredom, and allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.

The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real questions facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but "What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

When humankind possesses enormous new powers, and when the threat of famine, plague and war is finally lifted, what will we do with ourselves? What will the scientists, investors, bankers and presidents do all day? Write poetry? Success

Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on Earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world?

Humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision-making.

It is healthier for us to have questions we cannot answer, than to have answers we cannot question.

We aren't born with a ready-made conscience. As we pass through life, we hurt people and people hurt us, we act compassionately and others show compassion to us. if we pay attention, our moral sensitivity sharpens and these experiences become a source of valuable ethical knowledge about what is good, what is right and who I really am.

Total annihilation has a way of sharpening people's minds.

Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow

the real enigma of life is not what happens after you die but what happens before you die.