Quotes About Reflection

Keep an open mind, but no so open that your brains fall out

Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders.

There are silences that can be heard, even from the dead and from the severely oppressed. Much is recoverable from an apparently forgotten past. Sensitive and faithful historians can learn much of what has been lost, and much therefore that can be continued.

Titles, then, point backward in time. They have their origin in an unrepeatable past.

But what resounds most deeply in the life of Copernicus is the journey that made knowledge possible and not the knowledge that made the journey successful.

Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.

There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been—and therefore of all that we are.

Historians become infinite speakers when they see that whatever begins in freedom cannot end in necessity.

It is in the garden that we discover what travel truly is. We do not journey to a garden but by way of it.

Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else. Since gardening is a way not of subduing the indifference of nature but of raising one's own spontaneity to respond to the disregarding vagaries and unpredictabilities of nature, we do not look on nature as a sequence of changing scenes but look on ourselves as persons in passage.

The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective.

It is better to explore an idea than to keep a polite silence.

Through it all, Eric didn't say a word. He was innocent, Eric reminded himself, he never participated in the pranks. He never lifted a finger to harm David Hallenback. He didn't think it was funny, so he usually walked away, pretending not to see. But Eric did see. Just like all the other kids in the halls. And he slowly began to recognize it for what it was.

As anyone who has ever read a used book knows, nothing exposes readers to quite such a high degree of nakedness as the underlinings and marginalia they live behind...

cuando respondemos de modo visceral a un asunto, es tentador suponer que simplemente sabemos lo que debe ser la verdad, sin siquiera tener que considerar los argumentos opuestos.

Youth is the time for dreams, boy...The trick is, when you get older, not to forget them. —Captain John Winters

He climbed through the vast stillness, alone...and yet somehow, he knew, no longer alone. For now his two fathers climbed with him.

People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave.

We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that pertains to our questions...this especially applies to what we used to call bad things...the challenge is to find the silver lining in every event, no matter how negative.

Dreams come to tell us something about our lives that we are missing.

Apparently, before we are born, each of us experiences a vision of what our life can be, complete with reflections on our parents and our tendencies to engage in particular control dramas, even how we might work through these dramas with these parents and go on to be prepared for what we want to accomplish.

There are silences harder to take back than words.

Though now, of all that could have been, there is nothing.

We don't have to be anywhere. The party we left and the one we were headed to are probably over.