Quotes About Reflection

Detached analysis has a place—but, in the end, you've got to speak from the heart and pose the question of truth.)

he finds himself stuck beside a road that only others will travel.

No matter how carefully we defend ourselves, all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships.

To him who looks on the world reductively, the world looks reductively back.

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it."18

Knowing what I now know, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice?

Do you consider yourself a helpful person?" Following brief reflection, nearly everyone answered yes. In that privileged moment—after subjects had confirmed privately and affirmed publicly their helpful natures—the researchers pounced, requesting help with their survey. Now 77.3 percent volunteered.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it."2

as Sir Joshua Reynolds noted, "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." With

I needed to determine whether those reasons were genuine or mere justifications for my decision to stop there. So I asked myself the crucial question, "Knowing what I know about the real price of this gasoline, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice again?" Concentrating on the first burst of impression I sensed, I received a clear and unqualified answer. I would have driven right past.

Once we can directly experience something without the contamination of judgment or evaluation, our reflections on that experience are much richer and more meaningful.

Indeed, why even study history? The brief response is because our understandings of the past—who we are, where we came from, why we are here—inform our definitions of who we are in the present and have real implications and applicability for actions taken by us or in our name to shape the future.

Halfway through my steak I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar. I looked like someone who ought to eat alone. I didn't look in the mirror again.

Shopping is never over," Susan said. "It is merely suspended.

I headed straight into the setting sun, and rode west at an easy pace. It was going to be a long ride, and there was no reason to hurry.

From "The Book That Changed My Life": -"But your journey is never over until you return from it to share with society what you have learned." ~ Robert Ballard -"We never anticipate being changed by what we read. Such an experience cannot be planned for." ~ Brother Christopher

Flowers, like cats, were too involved in their own intricate magnificence to minister to her self-love.

The human soul aspires to higher things than the society columns of the New York Sunday papers, and the frivolous chatter of an overheated ballroom.

I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm in no hurry.

How do we come to choose what it is that we spend our days doing? Would we choose it again if we could? Did we choose it today, or has it simply carried us along somehow?

I would almost rather we had died that day than to have found ourselves here, lost somewhere between the dreaming and the coming true.

Forget the past, let the dead bury the dead. Things were working out fine, and that was the only thing he had to remember.