Quotes About Reflection

The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.

History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.

Thanksgiving-day, I fear, If one the solemn truth must touch, Is celebrated, not so much To thank the Lord for blessing o'er, As for the sake of getting more!

We thank Thee, O Father of all, for... all the soul-help that sad souls understand.

Open your eyes, boy. Your eyes. Open your eyes and no more turn aside and brood.

The years tumble past you like bits of paper on the street and you may not even feel the breeze at your back but then something catches your eye, a twist of black hair or a dog leaping to catch a tennis ball. The splintered chorus of a stupid pop song. You turn around and another chunk of your life drifts by like unrecognized trash and it was never yours to begin with.

All modern men are descended from wormlike creatures, but it shows more on some people.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes, rather than their minds.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

When Vul and Pashler let three weeks pass before asking their subjects the same question again, the benefit rose to one-third the value of a second opinion.

Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it.

One of the main functions of System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions "suggested" by System 1

Judgment is not a synonym for thinking, and making accurate judgments is not a synonym for having good judgment.

premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past.

Why be concerned with gossip? Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.

The remembering self's neglect of duration, its exaggerated emphasis on peaks and ends, and its susceptibility to hindsight combine to yield distorted reflections of our actual experience.

Their recommendation is that you should not put too much weight on regret; even if you have some, it will hurt less than you now think.

Changing one's mind about human nature is hard work, and changing one's mind for the worse about oneself is even harder. Nisbett

Everything makes sense in hindsight.

Searching for wisdom in historic events requires an act of faith—a belief in the existence of recurrent patterns waiting to be discovered.