Quotes About Reflection

They never listened until it was too late, and then only with stern forbearance and strong reminders of what might have been—had things been as they were perceived to be, which they were not.

The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you're right. As one grows old it is easier still.

for life was lived for active memories; the dormant ones lost meaning.

warmed by the cold sea around him.

C'mon kid. Think a minute, even if it hurts.

Meanwhile, back at reality...- G.Lucas

But it's better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know a little and say a lot.

Here, Mortimer Wheeler thought, is power. And a reminder of our mortality.

And so virtually every night for four and a half years, writing condolence letters and reading about these mostly young men and women, I wept.

martinis, steak, and red wine, a proven formula for deep thinking

The president said he would think about what I had said. Then he shocked me as the breakfast ended by saying that he wished he'd made the change in secretary of defense "a couple of years earlier." It was the only thing I ever heard him say even indirectly critical of Rumsfeld.

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.

The more you read, the more you calm down.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.

You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes much sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on good rather than on time....

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.

This forest silence improves anyone.

When cleaning I do it the way people go to church—not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice to go over familiar paths.

What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.

When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.