Quotes About Reflection

That quotation about not having time to stand and stare has never applied to me. I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much - in just standing and staring and I was at it again this morning.

At times it seemed unfair that I should be paid for my work; for driving out in the early morning with the fields glittering under the first pale sunshine and the wisps of mist still hanging on the high tops.

Everybody was asleep. Everybody except me, James Herriot, creeping sore and exhausted towards another spell of hard labour. Why the hell had I ever decided to become a country vet? I must have been crazy to pick a job where you worked seven days a week and through the night as well. Sometimes I felt as though the practice was a malignant, living entity; testing me, trying me out; putting the pressure on more and more to see just when at what point I would drop down dead.

Why had I entered this profession? I could have gone in for something easier and gentler—like coalmining or lumberjacking.

What I got in life that can't be probated I reckon I'll have to take with me. Mostly that is my thankful recollections of all the folks who crossed my trail since I shed my first tears in the year of 1880. Sometimes I had to look hard to find God in them, but most times I found Him. Usually it turned out to be easier to find than I had figured," Sheriff Bud Smith.

Ideas we don't know we have, have us.

Loss means losing what was We want to change but we don't want to lose. Without time for loss, we don't have time for soul.

you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence," wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, "We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.

To the question, "Why am I old?" the usual answer is, "Because I am becoming dead." But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.

Anno domini—that's the most fatal complaint of all in the end.

Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren't things to think about any more. All that matters is value - the ultimate value of what one does.

For Chips, like some old sea captain, still measured time by the signals of the past. . . .

Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue...

The capacity for growth depends on one's ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be "solved," then no change will occur.

The "gift" of tragedy is not destruction, but humility

There are flowers growing upon the hill Like they always have before. Will you stay here with me, or go and kill On a foreign lonely shore?

Where did Wayne Newton go when the USA went to shit? I was more stoned than I had realized.

In effect, Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.

Quoting Goethe :) "We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.

Who do you see when you think of you? Are you an outsider, Cool, distant, angry, swimming against the current, or are you in the flow? When they tell you, This is who you are, do you say yes or no? Who do you see when you look beyond the skin and the surface, when you drift to sleep, when you are the person no one else knows? Who are you on the inside? Don't answer these questions. Not yet. First, open your eyes, your mind, your heart. See.

Writing it down is the way I make it real, the way I find my way into what it is I feel. The words on paper or computer screen tell me more than what I knew before I wrote them, help me remember what I'm afraid I'll forget, let me keep what I don't want to lose, say to me: You were here.

And adventures, no matter how dark or disturbing to recall, are meant to be shared.