Quotes About Reflection

It is also sometimes shocking to see what the mind is taken up with, the way it spends its day, perhaps in sharp contrast to what you're actually doing, or to your sense of who you are.

It can be wonderful to see something about ourselves, even when what we're seeing is not especially wonderful.

Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha. —Ajahn Chah

But finally, you're not studying Buddhism. You're studying you.

You might from that vantage point go back and study impermanence with the other contemplations, seeing that the breath itself, for instance, arises and passes away.

Desire isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we need to see how pervasive and driven this whole tendency is, and bring some balance to it, so that we give ourselves some choices.

They might spend years tracing some mental formation back to its source.

Now I look at this story and it seems to be about all of us.

We've heard the content of our mental formations so many times we're sick of them.

Mindfulness is often likened to a mirror; it simply reflects what is there. It is not a process of thinking; it is preconceptual, before thought. One can be mindful of thought. There is all the difference in the world between thinking and knowing that thought is happening, as thoughts chase each other through the mind and the process is mirrored back to us.

Memory was my drug of choice. -Pea Hicks

Taking a lifetime to grow up.

It's good to get away from Washington and back here in the United States.

Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in the stars but rather closer to the earth her boots stand upon.

The limitless, lowering sky, the long stretches of motionless empty prairie, the silence, complete right down to the absence of birdsong -- who knows what decides a man to leave most of his words unspoken?

The odd thing about understanding was how often time alone seemed seemed to bring it about.

Norwegian way of keeping all our earthly affairs from achieving too much importance.

När hösten kommer blir landskapet så stilla att det nästan dånar av stillhet. Och sådana höstdagar kan man höra en och annan ensam fågel skrika i stillheten som om den ropade av sorg över något förlorat.

Så egendomligt overklig denna våning redan hade blivit! Det var inte en våning där någon bodde, utan en bild av en våning där någon hade bott. Precis som Goethehuset i Weimar eller August Strindbergs arbetsrum på Drottninggatan. En våning kunde bli en bild av sig själv när den inte längre var befolkad. Den var densamma som förut. Men den hade stelnat till bild.

Death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end.

famous Japanese adage that is both edifying and rippingly depictive," said Drayton. "Carp eyes coming, fish eyes going . . ." "Soon will be the wind in the pines

Maybe that was just childhood? You hurry up, pick the opposite path, try to make childhood end. Then, as an adult, you have no idea why you were running away. What, exactly, you needed so desperately to get away from.

That's the brutality of a breakup, isn't it? The people leaving think they did everything possible, the people left behind think what is possible hasn't even been tested yet.

Love doesn't leave you. Not all at once. It creeps back in, making you think it can be another way, that it can still be another way, and you have to remind yourself of the reasons that it probably won't be.