Quotes About Reflection

Prayer is not merely an occasional impulse to which we respond when we are in trouble: prayer is a life attitude.

A great painter of men must (as has been said) have a faculty of conversing, but he must also have a capacity for solitude. There is much of mankind that a man can only learn from himself.

A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.

A people never hears censure of itself.

I like space/openness in poems/poetry, and having the poems grouped into sections gives the reader a chance to breathe, to relax, to reflect, to meditate, to gather strength, excitement, anticipation to continue forward through the book.

Every place that I have lived haunts me. I always feel like I was never attentive enough and that I missed something, when in reality it's so much more, I missed volumes.

I change over time and my perception of the poem also changes, hence endless revision. I sometimes worry that I spend more time revising than writing new poems.

There are so many poetic styles and ways to write a poem. I can hardly say that I've consciously chosen a particular style, but more that I've just found myself writing and then started accumulating reasons why I was writing the way I was.

The Arctic expresses the sum of all wisdom: Silence.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.

The work of memory collapses time.

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

This is a very simple Rule, but one to which there should be no exception — never to go beyond your own experience.

In my judgment, the church in the United States must now face hard decisions such as we have not faced for a long time. We have indeed bought in as individual persons, even as a church, on consumerism, aimed at self-indulgence, comfort, security, and safety. We live our lives out of our affluence, and we discover that all our self-indulgence makes us satiated but neither happy nor safe.

We have nearly lost our capacity to think ihcologicafly about public issues and public problems.

Sabbath is the visible acknowledgment that life is not defined by commoditization.

So in Psalm 73, when life is inequitable, the speaker is aware of a skewed relationship in which one is less than human: When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you. (Ps. 73:21-22; cf. 102:7-8)49

We used to sing the hymn "Take Time to Be Holy." But perhaps we should be singing, "Take time to be human." Or finally, "Take time." Sabbath is taking time … time to be holy … time to be human.

Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest.

Prophetic preaching is dangerous work, not only because it has a subversive edge but because it requires an epistemological break with the assumed world of dominant imagination. This epistemological break makes us aware of our assumptions we have not recognized or reflected upon.

I want to say that probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it. And I regretted it every day since.