Quotes About Reflection

Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.

We ask for long life, but 'tis deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

Montaigne says, "Books are a languid pleasure," but I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was; he shuts the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any other than such.

thought can never ripen into truth.

For every grain of wit, there is a grain of folly. For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something

In inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

We are what we think about all day long.

It is better to hear than to speak.

The world -- this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult...So much only of life as I know by experience...The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.

Turn the eye upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

The point of imperfection which we occupy -- is it on the way up or down?

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads.

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us.

I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.