Quotes About Reflection

In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt. You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch. When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning.

Daily Law: Are there people whose work affects you in a powerful way? Analyze this and use them as models. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling—The Life's Task

Let us rid death of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death. At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects. . . . It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. . . . He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.

Esa distancia interior nos fascina. Las estrellas se burlan de sí mismas, ajustan siempre su imagen, la adaptan a los tiempos. Nada es más risible que una imagen que estuvo de moda hace diez años pero que ya no lo está. Las estrellas deben renovar constantemente su lustre, o enfrentarán

It is simple: Human nature is stronger than any individual, than any institution or technological invention. It ends up shaping what we create to reflect itself and its primitive roots. It moves us around like pawns.

Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done. In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt. You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch. When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning.

Boldness directs attention outward and keeps the illusion alive. It never induces awkwardness or embarrassment. And so we admire the bold, and prefer to be around them, because their self-confidence infects us and draws us outside our own realm of inwardness and reflection.

The other face of Janus looks constantly to the past—though not to remember past hurts or bear grudges. That would only curb your power. Half of the game is learning how to forget those events in the past that eat away at you and cloud your reason.

A veces puedes lograr más no haciendo nada.

The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within. —Abraham Maslow

At a certain point, you can almost become a stranger to yourself.

So much of our obsessive, internal thought process tends to disconnect us from the world.

analyze them in terms of the 48 laws of power, and you extract from them a lesson and an oath: "I shall never repeat such a mistake; I shall

Genuinely innocent people may still be playing for power, and are often horribly effective at the game, since they are not hindered by reflection. Once again, those who make a show or display of innocence are the least innocent of all.

Cartoons are data. If people find them funny, that tells us something about the world.

The matter does not appear to appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then.

the wise man never assumes anything, never regrets anything, is never wrong, never changes his mind.

Brave words. Easy to write when one was young and death was still skulking over a distant hill somewhere... - Pg. 82

Ich stellte mir seine Gedanken als einen schnellen, schmalen Wasserstrom vor, der sich durch die Fugen eines gefliesten Bodens bewegte - erst vorwärts, dann nach links und rechts ausgreifend, an einem Punkt kurz innehaltend, in eine andere Richtung weiter vorstoßend, sich immer weiter ausbreitend und verzweigend und dabei in seiner schimmernden, flüssigen Bewegung all die kleinen Möglichkeiten, Kosequenzen und Wahrscheinlichkeiten bedenkend.

I feel as if I have walked into a mirrored room and glimpsed myself from an unfamiliar angle for the first time. Is that really what I look like? Is that who I am?

He lived alone, in a small house full of books, and did nothing all day except read and think—a most dangerous occupation for a man, which in my experience leads invariably to dyspepsia and melancholy

Isn't an awareness of their transience what gives these moments their exquisite edge?

Well, well—be careful of what questions you ask, for fear of what answers you may receive.

My four golden principles are more important now than ever: take it one step at a time; approach the matter dispassionately; avoid a rush to judgement; confide in nobody until there is hard evidence.